Since switching to zsh I've run into a variety of issues with globbing1 and other features not working the way I was used to with bash. This post is about resolving another of those issues. Today I was trying to scp
some cachegrind files from a remote box and got the following error:
scp server-local:/var/www/server/cacheg* ~/Documents/cachegrinds
usage: scp [-12346BCpqrv] [-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file]
[-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program]
[[user@]host1:]file1 ... [[user@]host2:]file2
Basically scp is telling me I was using it wrong. After doing some searching around I found the following information on the zsh mailing list.
I suspect that you just want
setopt no_nomatch
so that the glob pattern is left unexpanded when it doesn't find any matching files. (You may have tounsetopt null_glob csh_null_glob
as well.) That's the only way I can think of that this would do as you seem to expect in bash but not in zsh.
After trying the first option—setopt no_nomatch
—my command still errored out. The second one—unsetopt null_glob csh_null_glob
— did allow me to type in my unmodified scp command and download my cachegrind files. I never like the idea of just typing in random commands without knowing what they do however. Before making the change persistent in my zsh config files I decided to do a little reading on the null_glob
option. After doing that I didn't really think turning this on was the best option, so I decided to use the other alternative I found in the mailing list post.
I could just put single quotes around the server path to get it to work with globbing but after many years of bash I am having trouble getting into the habbit of using single quotes with scp and it get's pretty frustrating.
That's what I decided to do, and lo, it paid off. Globbing worked as expected.
scp server-local:'/var/www/server/cacheg*' ~/Documents/cachegrinds
cachegrind.out.1426 100% 2578 2.5KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1427 100% 2574 2.5KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1428 100% 9233KB 9.0MB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1430 100% 2574 2.5KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1598 100% 2574 2.5KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1600 100% 3021KB 3.0MB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1602 100% 2174KB 2.1MB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1604 100% 30KB 30.4KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1605 100% 2575 2.5KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1778 100% 235 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1919 100% 9190KB 9.0MB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.1927 100% 2174KB 2.1MB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2021 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2157 100% 2574 2.5KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2293 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2302 100% 2578 2.5KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2346 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2393 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2428 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2445 100% 2443 2.4KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.2954 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.3139 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.3170 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
cachegrind.out.3278 100% 233 0.2KB/s 00:00
Globbing is a process that expands patterns to filenames.