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A Surprisingly Common Mistake Involving Wildcards & The Find Command (blog.robertelder.org)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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I came across this older article from 2020 and I found it informative. It's about how the shell does globbing and the potential issues it can cause if not understood correctly.

TLDR:

find . -not -name *.py -delete and find . -not -name '*.py' -delete will behave differently in certain scenarios.

In the first example, the shell will replace the wildcard pattern with a list of matching file names IF there are any matches in the current directory. If there isn't, then it won't do anything and will pass *.py to find.

In the second example, the shell won't do any globbing at all and will just pass *.py

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[–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If you're contemplating doing something destructive, do a dry-run first.

@vk6flab@lemmy.radio is a WITCH I tell you! This is black magic!!

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