nickson@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Ray Nickson) (08/08/89)
There is a bug in glob.c (bash version 1.02, gcc-compiled, on an hp300
running more/bsd) which causes the following behaviour. Switch to a
directory containing only the files A and BC, then do echo *[^C]
I (usually) get both files listed. (my understanding is that BC
shouldn't be listed).
The problem is (not surprisingly) in the glob_match function in
glob.c; when matching against *<something>, we try to see how much of
our text <something> matches, and make * match enough to make this
work. So, we first attempt to match [^C] to BC; this fails because
[^C] must match exactly one character. Matching [^C] to C fails,
because it cannot match a C. But then, we try to match [^C] against
the null string; the code as written will test the first character of
the null string ('\0') against each element of the set (i.e. C); it
won't match, so we claim that "" matches [^C].
The easiest solution is probably to special-case the null string in
text being matched against a set, as we do when matching against ?.
-rgn
--
Ray Nickson, Dept. Comp. Sci., Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
nickson@comp.vuw.ac.nz ...!uunet!vuwcomp!nickson + 64 4 721000x8593