[vox-tech] Ubuntu 10.04 LTS upgrade woes

[Ken Bloom]

On Tue, 2011-01-18 at 19:00 -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Chanoch (Ken) Bloom (kbloom at gmail.com):
> 
> > He wants *only* the dotfiles (and none of the regular files) 
> [...]
> > That's why he changed it to the following, which requires there be a
> > non-dot character after the dot
> > 
> >     tar zcfv dotfiles.tar .[!.]*
> 
> $ cd /tmp
> $ touch ..foo
> $ ls .[!.]*
> $
> 
> ;->
> 
> (Yes, '.[!.]*' is nonethless a pretty good solution, among a myriad of
> imperfect ones.)

That is, unfortunately the problem with the shell -- the best you can
come in most cases is an imperfect solution.

Look how many answers people came up on StackOverflow when I asked the
best way to tell whether or not a glob matched any files.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2937407/test-whether-a-glob-has-any-matches-in-bash