From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

Hi experts !

I'm just playing with bash's "extglob" option:

$ shopt -s extglob
$ echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d)
/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d
$

So far, so good. But now I want to catch the global file and potential
custom files.

$ echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d/*)
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
$

I would accept this if there were no files in the directory but in fact,
there is one. Where's my brain fault?

And to my understanding, ksh behaves like this by default, right?

Regards

Frank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:57:06 +0100, Frank Winkler wrote:

Hi experts !

I'm just playing with bash's "extglob" option:

$ shopt -s extglob
$ echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d)
/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d
$

So far, so good. But now I want to catch the global file and potential custom files.

$ echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d/*)
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
$

I would accept this if there were no files in the directory but in fact, there is one. Where's my brain fault?

According to the bash manpage,
"If the extglob shell option is enabled using the shopt builtin, several
extended pattern matching operators are recognized."
...
" ?(pattern-list)
Matches zero or one occurrence of the given patterns"

Ok, so your "given pattern" is ".d/*". Do you have any files that have a
".d/*" suffix? I thought not.

Try moving the /* to outside of the patternlist, as in
echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d)/*

HTH

And to my understanding, ksh behaves like this by default, right?

I have no idea, I don't use ksh. Sorry
--
Lew Pitcher
"In Skills We Trust"
Not LLM output - I'm just like this.
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 17.02.2026 15:59, Lew Pitcher wrote:

>Try moving the /* to outside of the patternlist, as in
> echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d)/*

Nice idea but this won't work either as your expression also (falsely)
expects "sshd_config" to be a dir and hence, it will _only_ match the
custom files. The ".d" suffix (as a dir name) _and_ the files below it
are one common optional part of the path.

Thanks anyway!

Frank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:59:20 +0000, Lew Pitcher wrote:

On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:57:06 +0100, Frank Winkler wrote:

Hi experts !

I'm just playing with bash's "extglob" option:

$ shopt -s extglob
$ echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d)
/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d
$

So far, so good. But now I want to catch the global file and potential
custom files.

$ echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d/*)
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
$

I would accept this if there were no files in the directory but in fact,
there is one. Where's my brain fault?

According to the bash manpage,
"If the extglob shell option is enabled using the shopt builtin, several
extended pattern matching operators are recognized."
...
" ?(pattern-list)
Matches zero or one occurrence of the given patterns"

Ok, so your "given pattern" is ".d/*". Do you have any files that have a ".d/*" suffix? I thought not.

What might be useful is to know that POSIX has standardized the way this "globbing" works. You can read glob(7) ("man 7 glob") for all the details,
but the piece that governs /your/ problem is
"Globbing is applied on each of the components of a pathname separately.
A '/' in a pathname cannot be matched by a '?' or '*' wildcard, or by a
range like "[.-0]". A range cannot contain an explicit '/' character; this
would lead to a syntax error."
So, your "?(.d/*) expression cant work, because none of the components of
a pathname may contain a '/' character, and, thus, will never match the expression.

Try moving the /* to outside of the patternlist, as in
echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d)/*

HTH

And to my understanding, ksh behaves like this by default, right?

I have no idea, I don't use ksh. Sorry

--
Lew Pitcher
"In Skills We Trust"
Not LLM output - I'm just like this.
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 17.02.2026 17:43, Lew Pitcher wrote:

>So, your "?(.d/*) expression cant work, because none of the components of
>a pathname may contain a '/' character, and, thus, will never match the
>expression.

Still trying to figure this out completely ...

But what's the solution then? Isn't there a closed expression for that?
Do I really have to use the uncool

/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*

way?

TIA

Frank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 2026-02-17 17:53, Frank Winkler wrote:

On 17.02.2026 17:43, Lew Pitcher wrote:

So, your "?(.d/*) expression cant work, because none of the

components of

a pathname may contain a '/' character, and, thus, will never match the
expression.

And, concerning the upthread question, Kornshell behaves the same.

Still trying to figure this out completely ...

Simply put; don't use slashes - the special character in the Unix
file system - in "extended" _*file globbing* patterns_ (as quoted
by Lew).

In Ksh you can of course still use it in _*text* pattern matching_.

$ x='Projects/Algol68' ; [[ $x == ?(*/)Algol68 ]] && echo match
match

But what's the solution then? Isn't there a closed expression for that?
Do I really have to use the uncool

-a /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*

way?

If your task is actually two-fold
display file sshd_config by globbing
and
display any file under "/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/" by globbing
then yes.

If you want to match _path-*strings*_ (including optional slashes)
then do text-processing, i.e. create the path names text and grep

find ... | grep <some-pattern-including-slahses>

I don't think this approach is "cooler" (whatever you meant by
"uncool"), but the concept should be clearly differentiated now.

HTH.

Janis

TIA

-a-a-a-aFrank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 17/02/2026 17:30, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 2026-02-17 17:53, Frank Winkler wrote:

On 17.02.2026 17:43, Lew Pitcher wrote:

-a-a>So, your "?(.d/*) expression cant work, because none of the
components of
-a-a>a pathname may contain a '/' character, and, thus, will never match
the
-a-a>expression.

And, concerning the upthread question, Kornshell behaves the same.

Still trying to figure this out completely ...

Simply put; don't use slashes - the special character in the Unix
file system - in "extended" _*file globbing* patterns_ (as quoted
by Lew).

In Ksh you can of course still use it in _*text* pattern matching_.

$ x='Projects/Algol68' ; [[ $x == ?(*/)Algol68 ]] && echo match
match

But what's the solution then? Isn't there a closed expression for
that? Do I really have to use the uncool

-a-a /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*

way?

If your task is actually two-fold
-a-a display file sshd_config by globbing
and
-a-a display any file under "/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/" by globbing
then yes.

If you want to match _path-*strings*_ (including optional slashes)
then do text-processing, i.e. create the path names text and grep

-a find ... | grep <some-pattern-including-slahses>

I don't think this approach is "cooler" (whatever you meant by
"uncool"), but the concept should be clearly differentiated now.

Also, do have search permisson for /etc/ssh/ssh_config.d ?



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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

Frank Winkler <usenet@f.winkler-ka.de>:

But what's the solution then? Isn't there a closed expression
for that? Do I really have to use the uncool

/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*

way?

Yes, you do.-a And you might use
shopt -s nullglob
al well (unless you are okay with surprising results if
/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*
doesn't match any pathnames).
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:53:06 +0100, Frank Winkler wrote:

Do I really have to use the uncool

/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*

ldo@theon:~> echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config{,.d/*}
/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/20-systemd-userdb.conf

Though I think the alternatives-within-braces thing is a bash-ism ...
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 2026-02-17 22:49, Lawrence DrCOOliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:53:06 +0100, Frank Winkler wrote:

Do I really have to use the uncool

/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*

ldo@theon:~> echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config{,.d/*}
/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/20-systemd-userdb.conf

Though I think the alternatives-within-braces thing is a bash-ism ...

No, you find brace-expressions also in ksh and zsh, for example.

But note that this is a textual expansion by the shells that is
performed before the pattern-(here '*')-globbing is performed.

In cases like above it's IMO horrible to read and to parse, but
mileages may vary.

Janis

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

Frank Winkler <usenet@f.winkler-ka.de> writes:

But what's the solution then? Isn't there a closed
expression for that? Do I really have to use the
uncool

/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*

If I understand correctly, your problem is
solvable without using extglob, you can just use
brace expansions like this:

$ echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config{,.d/*}
/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/test.conf
$

This selects the sshd_config file, and other
config files inside the directory sshd_config.d.
Curly braces surround a list of comma-separated
options for expansion, so I specified nothing (the
empty string) as the first one, then comma, then
.d/*, which seems to do what you want. Check the
braces expansion section in the bash manual for
more details.


Best Regards,
Lumin Etherlight
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 17.02.2026 22:16, Richard Harnden wrote:

>Also, do have search permisson for /etc/ssh/ssh_config.d ?

I suppose this question is pointed to me. Answer: yes, I have :) ...

Regards

Frank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 17.02.2026 22:49, Lawrence DrCOOliveiro wrote:

> ldo@theon:~> echo /etc/ssh/sshd_config{,.d/*}
> /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/20-systemd-userdb.conf
>
>Though I think the alternatives-within-braces thing is a bash-ism ...

Lawrence and Lumin, that's a great idea! Thanks very much for waking me
up ... but indeed, I wasn't aware that this also works with path names.
So it looks like I thought just the wrong way round: I assumed "extglob"
to work with paths and brace expansion to not do so. Funny!

Regards

Frank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 17.02.2026 22:08, Helmut Waitzmann wrote:

>al well (unless you are okay with surprising results if
>
> -a /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*
>
>doesn't match any pathnames).

Yes - I already faced this issue sometimes in the past ;) ...

Regards

Frank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 18.02.2026 09:51, I wrote:

> -a>Though I think the alternatives-within-braces thing is a bash-ism ...

It seems that it also works with ksh but no matter if bash or ksh, it
does need the "nullglob" feature to give the correct result.

That's easy to do in bash but how do I combine the brace expression with
ksh's "~(N:)" (as there is no "nullglob" option)?

TIA

Frank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 18/02/2026 12:43, Frank Winkler wrote:

On 18.02.2026 09:51, I wrote:

Though I think the alternatives-within-braces thing is a bash-ism ...

It seems that it also works with ksh but no matter if bash or ksh, it
does need the "nullglob" feature to give the correct result.

That's easy to do in bash but how do I combine the brace expression with ksh's "~(N:)" (as there is no "nullglob" option)?

I think I'd use find ...

$ find /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d) -type f
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/50-redhat.conf /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/01-permitrootlogin.conf

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On 18.02.2026 15:32, Richard Harnden wrote:

>I think I'd use find ...
>
>$ find /etc/ssh/sshd_config?(.d) -type f

Of course, this works - but the idea was to do it shell-internally.

Regards

Frank

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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell

On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:51:37 +0100, Frank Winkler wrote:

... I wasn't aware that [alternatives-within-braces] also works with
path names.

The alternatives-within-braces syntax is handled during parsing of the
command syntax, before we get to wildcard expansion and actual command execution. At this stage, the command parser has no idea what the
words it is processing mean: whether theyrCOre file names, or just
special keywords that might mean something to the specific command, or
what.

So of course the syntax will work with anything, path names or not.
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