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Shell glob element [:space:] not working as expected

Hello :)

The following terminal transcript shows [:space:] not matching a space character as expected. Why not?

Code:

c@CW8:~$ touch 'a b'

c@CW8:~$ ls -l a[:space:]b

ls: cannot access a[:space:]b: No such file or directory

c@CW8:~$ ls -l a*b

-rw-r--r-- 1 c c 0 2009-07-25 15:19 a b

c@CW8:~$ shopt extglob

extglob                on

c@CW8:~$ locale

LANG=en_IN

LC_CTYPE="en_IN"

LC_NUMERIC="en_IN"

LC_TIME="en_IN"

LC_COLLATE="en_IN"

LC_MONETARY="en_IN"

LC_MESSAGES="en_IN"

LC_PAPER="en_IN"

LC_NAME="en_IN"

LC_ADDRESS="en_IN"

LC_TELEPHONE="en_IN"

LC_MEASUREMENT="en_IN"

LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_IN"

LC_ALL=

c@CW8:~$ echo $SHELL

/bin/bash

c@CW8:~$ /bin/bash --version

GNU bash, version 3.2.39(1)-release (i486-pc-linux-gnu)

Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Best

Charles

I have always used it with double square brackets, that is a range of characters, where the characters are those given by [:space:]. It works for me:

Code:

$ touch 'a b'

$ ls -l a[[:space:]]b

-rw-r--r-- 1 colucix users 0 Jul 25 12:09 a b

$ shopt extglob

extglob        off

$ bash --version

GNU bash, version 3.2.25(1)-release (i686-redhat-linux-gnu)

Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Hello colucix

Quote:

Originally Posted by colucix (Post 3619720)

I have always used it with double square brackets, that is a range of characters, where the characters are those given by [:space:]

Thanks, that does it!

So where the GNU bash reference says Within ‘[’ and ‘]’, character classes can be specified using the syntax [:class:], where class is one of the following classes defined in the posix standard: alnum, alpha, ascii, blank ... it means [:blank:] within [] giving [[:blank:]. Good to know.

Best

Charles