[TriLUG] missing packages help

[jason watts]

thanks for the info, it cleared some things up, and made others foggy, its 
just something i will have to clarify on my own to myself later on :)

again, thanks for the help and info

>From: Alan Porter <porter at trilug.org>
>Reply-To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list <trilug at trilug.org>
>To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list <trilug at trilug.org>
>Subject: Re: [TriLUG] missing packages help
>Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 14:59:37 -0400
>
>
>>i was trying to to show all the files that begain with lib. i was looking 
>>to see if i could find something similar to the libobdcinst
>
>You were trying to show all of the PACKAGES that started with "lib".  You 
>were not trying to show all of the FILES IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY that 
>started with "lib".
>
>It's a subtle, but very important distinction.  Once you figure out what 
>the shell is doing with what you type, things tend to make a lot more 
>sense.
>
>>>When there are no files that begin with "lib", the shell can do one of 
>>>two things:
>>>(1) replace "lib*" with ""
>>>(2) keep the "lib*"
>>
>>im confused about option 1)... but thats what they made man pages for, ill 
>>have to look into that later.
>
>The shell replaces wildcards before it calls the command.  Here's some 
>examples.
>
>$ ls
>(expand wildcards, no wildcards, so just do "ls")
>resume.pdf
>song1.mp3
>song2.mp3
>
>$ ls *.mp3
>(expand wildcards, so "ls song1.mp3 song2.mp3")
>song1.mp3
>song2.mp3
>
>$ shopt -s nullglob ; ls *.doc
>(expand wildcards, no matches, nullglob is set, so "ls ")
>resume.pdf
>song1.mp3
>song2.mp3
>
>$ shopt -u nullglob ; ls *.doc
>(expand wildcards, no matches, nullglob is not set, so "ls *.doc")
>no such file "*.doc"
>
>This is what I meant by "Each of these may seem intuitive under different 
>circumstances".  In this case, it seems more intuitive to leave nullglob 
>unset and get an error message from "ls".  "ls" had no idea what to do when 
>it was passed "*.doc".  It was looking for a file called, literally, 
>"star-dot-doc".
>
>If you'd like to see a case there it's more intuitive to have nullglob set, 
>try "touch *.ogg" in an empty directory.  What did it do?  If nullglob was 
>set, it would create a file called "*.ogg".  Not what you thought, was it?  
>The "touch" command simply did the best it could with what the shell told 
>it to do.  The shell tried to expand the wildcard, failed, and passed the 
>wildcard on to "touch".  The only thing "touch" knew how to do was create 
>an empty file called "star-dot-ogg".
>
>For people who come from the DOS world, it might seem weird for the shell 
>to do the filename wildcard expansion.  DOS programmers typically had to do 
>that themselves.  So each DOS program tended to handle wildcard expansion a 
>little differently.  Ugh.
>
>An exercise for the reader... which is more conservative when using "rm 
>*.pdf", setting nullglob or not?  This is why I leave nullglob OFF (I set 
>it with a "shopt -u nullglob" in my .bashrc).
>
>Anyway, it sounds like you're on your way with the libraries.  I hope this 
>little lesson in bash and other unix shells has not been too much of a 
>diversion.  And I hope it sheds some light on what might otherwise seem 
>like unpredictable behavior.
>
>Alan
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