Re: Wildcard bug or feature?

On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 12:53:05PM -0400, Steve Brown enlightened us:
> Due to disk space constraints on my notebook, I was unable to update 435 
> applications all at once.  Wanting to do my updates in smaller batches, 
> I tried 'yum update apr-*' and was happy to find that I could use 
> wildcards to specify smaller groups of applications to update.  Next, I 
> tried 'yum update a* b* c* d*' figuring I would do four letters of the 
> alphabet at a time.  The prompt said I would only be updating 2 
> applications, though I know from my 'yum list updates' list that there 
> are many more applications to be updated beginning with those letters.
> 
> Next, I tried 'yum update a*' and noticed that there were may lines 
> saying there was no match followed by the name of a file that started 
> with 'a' that was in the current directory.  When I moved into an empty 
> subdirectory and ran 'yum update a*', it ran exactly as I had hoped.
> 
> If this is a bug, please fix it.  If it's a feature, please explain.
> 

It has nothing to do with yum, but with your shell expansion. In a directory
with files, when you specify 

  yum update a* 

the shell translates that into

  yum update a.pdf another.pdf an_old_file.txt 

(or whatever). To prevent this behavior, learn how your shell iterprets
wildcards. For bash, using 

  yum update "a*" 

would suffice.

Matt
  
-- 
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics 
Department of Social Work
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263