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From: pauld@stowe.cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: testing if a directory is empty (OOOPS!)
Message-ID: <1991Apr16.173314.22085@beaver.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 16 Apr 91 17:33:14 GMT
References: <1991Apr15.195513.17840@beaver.cs.washington.edu> <MEISSNER.91Apr15221545@curley.osf.org>
Sender: news@beaver.cs.washington.edu (USENET News System)
Reply-To: pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis)
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 53

In article <MEISSNER.91Apr15221545@curley.osf.org> meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) writes:
>In article <1991Apr15.195513.17840@beaver.cs.washington.edu>
>pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) writes:
>

         [ my stupid idea deleted ]

>
>It still isn't any reason to fail.  Off of the top of my head, the
>following should work:
>
>	[ "`cd $1; echo .[^.] .??* *`" = ".[^.] .??* *" ]
>--
>Michael Meissner	email: meissner@osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
>Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142
>
>Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?

I may be wrong, but it seems regrettably not. From the man page for csh(1): 

	The sequence `[...]'  matches any one of the characters enclosed.
	Within `[...]', a pair of characters separated by `-' matches any
	character lexi- cally between the two.

and from sh(1):

	  [ ... ]
	       Matches any one of the characters enclosed.  A pair of char-
	       acters separated by - matches any character lexically
	       between the pair.


These shell's don't know about the "[^" convention, and indeed:

	# echo .[^.] 
	..			<can someone explain this>
	# echo .[^f]
	echo: No Match
	
Your guess is as good as mine. What will work, for 7-bit systems
anyway, is:

	echo .[^@--/-~]* *

This matches ALL dots files except . and ... Unfortunately, my csh
(Ultrix 4.1) doesn't handle the inclusion of ascii 127 (DELETE) in
this list very graciously, and if you have non-ASCII (> code 127)
chars in any dot file file name, this will also break. I increasingly
feel that the "rmdir; if [ $? ..." approach is the best way to
crack this.
-- 
Paul Barton-Davis			<pauld@cs.washington.edu>
UW Computer Science Lab		``to shatter tradition makes us feel free''