I came across this older article from 2020 and I found it informative. It’s about how the shell does globbing and the potential issues it can cause if not understood correctly.

TLDR:

find . -not -name *.py -delete and find . -not -name '*.py' -delete will behave differently in certain scenarios.

In the first example, the shell will replace the wildcard pattern with a list of matching file names IF there are any matches in the current directory. If there isn’t, then it won’t do anything and will pass *.py to find.

In the second example, the shell won’t do any globbing at all and will just pass *.py

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
    21·
    21 hours ago

    Basic habit to get into:

    If you’re contemplating doing something destructive, do a dry-run first.

    In this case, remove the -delete flag, run the command and see what you get.

    A good approach is to build a command step by step and test your assumptions each iteration.

    Things might take a few moments longer, but one day it’s going to save your bacon.

    As for unexpected globbing, learn the difference between quoted and unquoted, and single versus double quotes.

    Source: Linux user for 25+ years

  • Consti@lemmy.world
    3·
    22 hours ago

    Using zsh will gelp with that mistake, because by default it will turn the ‘no matches’ scenario into an error. But seriously, always quote your arguments if there is any chance for ambiguity (also for variables)