Comment on mv *.jpg is complete bullshit.

• GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ahhh. That’s a confusing thread, with a couple confounding factors.

  The OP in that thread is attempting to a batch rename, which is out of scope of the mv command.

  If you are NOT trying to change the name of the file, I recommend always making the last argument of mv your destination directory, rather than the destination file. This is strictly mandatory if you are moving multiple files.

  OP in that SO thread used the filename as the destination path — a filename which did not exist, and therefore could not be resolved by the wildcard. And if it had existed, the move would have failed. Because of that, mv /data/*/Sample_*/logs/*_Data_time.err /data/*/Sample_*/logs/*_Data_time_orig.err is not a valid command.

  OP cannot accomplish what they want with a single mv command. They would need to use a loop or something like find.

  I agree that the lack of universal consistency in how commands handle arguments is unfortunate. There’s no way around that without reinventing the entire OS. Many commands let you pass ‘–’ as an argument to signify that any subsequent arguments should not be interpreted as options even if they begin with ‘-’. But that’s entirely up to the implementation of each program; it’s not a shell feature.

  Future OS designers: consider typed arguments. Abandon all legacy cruft.

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  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There’s no way around that without reinventing the entire OS.

    Disagree. If wildcard expansion is not a feature of the tool, it shouldn’t be up to the tool to shape how each expanded input is passed. Some hideous escape syntax ought to force *.jpg to appear as “-a.jpg” instead of -a.jpg, once it reaches mv.

    Instead * is acting as a cheeky little ls alternative, minus any degree of formatting control, and piping actual ls input into mv is similarly fraught with complications.

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    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Some hideous escape syntax ought to force *.jpg to appear as “-a.jpg” instead of -a.jpg, once it reaches mv

      The issue here is that there’s no difference here between -a.jpg and “-a.jpg”.

      Go ahead and try these commands. They are 100% equivalent:

      ls -laR
      ls "-laR"
      ls '-laR'
      

      The reason these are equivalent is because quoting (and expansion, and globbing) is processed in the shell. The shell then passes the evaluated string as an argument to the tool. All of those evaluate to the same string, so they look exactly the same to the ls command.

      What is the solution if there’s a file name that matches something the tool thinks is an argument? What would the correct behavior be?

      The only solution is to include some way to communicate to the tool what each argument is. In practice, you could do ls – * and it would work even if the first filename was “-laR”. However, not all tools use the – convention. This is really core to the design of the OS, in that command arguments have no type.

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      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Jesus. That’s beyond Javascript levels of “helpfully” reinterpreting strings. That’s borderline Excel behavior.

        What is the point of strings allowing every character besides \0 if they’re gonna eat quotation marks?

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