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

[Steven W. O. <st...@sy...>]

On Wednesday, Oct 1st 2008 at 09:53 -0000, quoth Fabian Stietzel:

=>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

Thanks Fabian. Certainly worth checking. Nick, do you know what code we're 
talking about here? Where is this cp command in question?

-- 
steveo at syslang dot net TMMP1 http://frambors.syslang.net/
Do you have neighbors who are not frambors? Steven W. Orr