[vox-tech] shell question: globbing and command arguments

[Mitch Patenaude]

To be more general, you should escape the *, and then it gets passed
to the remote scp, which is smart enough to handle it (it actually uses
the shell on the remote machine to do the globbing.)

If you're using older shells (real bourne shell, csh, etc.) then the
unescaped * will cause an error (unless you 'set noglob' in csh).
Bash is smart enough to realize that if no local globbing works, that
it should just be passed on to the underlying program, for instance:

[mrp@calisto mrp]$ echo frobble*
frobble*
[mrp@calisto mrp]$ echo f*
fern.jpg ffjuser30 flash forAudrey forte4j fun
[mrp@calisto mrp]$ csh
[mrp@calisto ~]$ echo frobble*
echo: No match.
[mrp@calisto ~]$ set noglob
[mrp@calisto ~]$ echo frobble*
frobble*
[mrp@calisto ~]$

Thus endeth the unix history lesson :-)

   -- Mitch

On Monday, Nov 3, 2003, at 08:37 US/Pacific, p@dirac.org wrote:

> i've always wondered about this...
>
> if i have a bunch of files on a remote host beginning with "backup", i
> can copy them to the local host using:
>
>    scp p@remote.host:backup* .
>
> and it works.  but why?  doesn't the shell get to "*" first?  i'd
> understand this working:
>
>    scp 'p@remote.host:backup*' .
>
> but why does scp see the asterisk in the unquoted version?
>
> pete
>
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