Re: [Bashburn-info] Copy Data CD to CD Issues

[Fabian S. <fa...@sc...>]

Steven W. Orr wrote:
> * The copy command is using globbing. Globbing is evil. We need to only 
> copy files that are explicitly specified. If you copy by saying something 
> like...
>   
The shell is globbing. cp will never do it. It's the shell. The globbing
can be avoided easily by using single quotation marks.

> cp dir/* somewhere/
>
> Then there's no way to detect that the cp didn't pick something up. We 
> have to either verify that the disk is mounted and/or we have to always 
> specify explict files. DEATH TO GLOBBING.
>
>   
Of course you can detect if cd "didn't pick something up". cd will pick
every file supplied as a command line argument before the last (target).
if someting goes wrong the return value/exit code of cd will not be 0.
the shell does the globbing, thus instead of 'dir/*', 'dir/a' 'dir/b' is
supplied to cp as command line argument if 'dir/a' and 'dir/b' exist.

If you do something like 'cp dir/* somewhere/' you will get an error if
'dir/' is empty. This is because if 'dir/' is empty the shell will not
do globbing for the asterisk. So cp will complain that it can't find the
file 'dir/*'. I think before doing major changes here...maybe somebody
just forgot to check $? after the cp invocation.


Just my 2 cents,
Fabian