perl substitution question

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 15, 2007, at 2:29 PM, Gary Kline wrote:
>> OMG!  I managed to break a new shell war :)
>>
>> /me ducks and runs very far away
>
> 	No! no, cometh backeth, Giorgos!  No war, just peace, love
> 	and flowers:-)

% cd /usr/ports/mail/imap-uw/ && make extract && cd work/imap-2004g
% tail -3 Makefile
# A monument to a hack of long ago and far away...
love:
         @echo not war?

>   Actually, I do use zsh, just have no clue how to
> 	set noglob.  I was going to ask, but didn't want to show my
> 	ignorance.  [[ been using zsh for 16, 17 years... ]]
[ ... ]
> 	Chuck, exactly what does noglob do? How to set/unset,  please?

noglob is a keyword (a "precommand modifier", specifically) that  
disables wildcard filename globbing:

   % cd /tmp
   % touch 'a*'
   % touch 'ab'
   % ls a*
   a*              ab
   % noglob ls a*
   a*

This trivial case isn't too useful, but consider wanting to copy  
all .jpg files from your home directory on another machine to the  
local machine via scp or rsync:

   noglob scp kline at machine:*.jpg .

It's also amazingly handy in conjunction with the "find" command:

   noglob find /usr/obj -name *.a

...so much so that I do:

   alias find='noglob find'

...in my ZSH environment.

-- 
-Chuck