shell commands - exclusion

[t-u-t]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Dan Nelson <dnelson at allantgroup.com> wrote:

> zsh has the ^ and ~ glob metacharacters that are enabled with you enable
> EXTENDED_GLOB:
>
>       ^x     (Requires EXTENDED_GLOB to be set.)  Matches anything except
>              the pattern x.  This has a higher precedence than `/', so
>              `^foo/bar' will search directories in `.' except `./foo' for a
>              file named `bar'.
>
>       x~y    (Requires EXTENDED_GLOB to be set.)  Match anything that
>              matches the pattern x but does not match y.  This has lower
>              precedence than any operator except `|', so `*/*~foo/bar' will
>              search for all files in all directories in `.' and then
>              exclude `foo/bar' if there was such a match.  Multiple
>              patterns can be excluded by `foo~bar~baz'.  In the exclusion
>              pattern (y), `/' and `.' are not treated specially the way
>              they usually are in globbing.
>
> > and if there is, could the same be applied to other similar batch (?)
> > operations, like pkg_delete -f "*" { except firefox3 wine thunderbird }
> > etc..
>
> That wildcard is expanded internally by pkg_delete using the C fnmatch()
> function, which just does simple *?[] shell pattern matching.
>
> > i'm a bit new to the shell (took me a while to figure out *ls* and *ls |
> > more*), but i can't find anything from google cuz i don't know what this
> > would be called in the first place.
> >
> > otherwise is it better to protect them with chflags or other trickery?
>
> One workaround is to temporarily move the files you don't want to process
> into another directory, then move them back when you're done.
>
> --
>
thank you,
i am interested in knowing how to do this stuff in general for simple
operations, since like this workaround would work fine with file
operations, but not for pkg_delete and other commands i can't think of right
now. I was just wondering if there was a commonly used/known method or
*switch* i could look into.

however, form this post i get the impression that it is better( and
worthwhile) to learn to do some proper scripting. say, prepare a list in a
file, then pass each one to the command instead of "*".

cheers