I tried to use:
dir('dirname\*')
and it did not work. It started to work after I started to use:
dir('dirname\m*')
Does anybody know why?
Matlab does understand wildcards *, but in the way you unluckiliy tried to adhere to Windows cmd path conventions, you entered the string \*, which is a literal asterisk (due to the escaping backslash).
A workaround, or the preferred way to specify paths on all platforms, is using a forward slash / as a directory seperator.
dir('dirname/*')
This also explains why adding the m after the backslash "fixed" the issue; the asterisk was no longer a literal asterisk, but allowed to be interpreted as a wildcard character.
EDIT: Documentation explicitely says the wildcard character is allowed and works as expected (see my explanation above).
Try to provide the full path, like dir('c:\dirname*.m'),
and make sure the folder 'dirname' exists.
What is your OS ? Here on Windows, the first line works well. However, the "*" is maybe considered by Matlab as a literal "*". What happens with dir('dirname/*') ?
Related
I have a folder that was created automatically. The user unintentionally provided smart (curly) quotes as part of the name, and the process that sanitizes the inputs did not catch these. As a result, the folder name contains the smart quotes. For example:
this-is-my-folder’s-name-“Bob”
I'm now trying to rename/remove said folder on the command line, and none of the standard tricks for dealing with files/folders with special characters (enclosing in quotes, escaping the characters, trying to rename it by inode, etc.) are working. All result in:
mv: cannot move this-is-my-folder’s-name-“Bob” to this-is-my-folders-name-BOB: No such file or directory
Can anyone provide some advice as to how I can achieve this?
To get the name in a format you can copy-and-paste into your shell:
printf '%q\n' this*
...will print out the filename in a manner the shell will accept as valid input. This might look something like:
$'this-is-my-folder200\231s-name-200\234Bob200\235'
...which you can then use as an argument to mv:
mv $'this-is-my-folder200\231s-name-200\234Bob200\235' this-is-my-folders-name-BOB
Incidentally, if your operating system works the same way mine does (when running the test above), this would explain why using single-character globs such as ? for those characters didn't work: They're actually more than one byte long each!
You can use shell globbing token ? to match any single character, so matching the smart quotes using ? should do:
mv this-is-my-folder?s-name-?Bob? new_name
Here replacing the smart quotes with ? to match the file name.
There are several possibilities.
If an initial substring of the file name ending before the first quote is unique within the directory, then you can use filename completion to help you type an appropriate command. Type "mv" (without the quotes) and the unique initial substring, then press the TAB key to request filename completion. Bash will complete the filename with the correct characters, correctly escaped.
Use a graphical file browser. Then you can select the file to rename by clicking on it. (Details of how to proceed from there depend on the browser.) If you don't have a graphical terminal and can't get one, then you may be able to do the same with a text-mode browser such as Midnight Commander.
A simple glob built with the ? or * wildcard should be able to match the filename
Use a more complex glob to select the filename, and perhaps others with the same problem. Maybe something like *[^a-zA-Z0-9-]* would do. Use a pattern substitution to assign a new name. Something like this:
for f in *[^a-zA-Z0-9-]*; do
mv "$f" "${f//[^a-zA-Z0-9-]/}"
done
The substitution replaces all appearances of a characters that are not decimal digits, appercase or lowercase Latin letters, or hyphens with nothing (i.e. it strips them). Do take care before you use this, though, to make sure you're not going to make more changes than you intend to do.
I am trying to run this command in vi
:s/href="\//href="http:\/\/website.com\/folder\/subfolder\//g
but got this error E486: Pattern not found: href="\/
What am i doing wrong?
That error means pretty much what it says. vi didn't find any pattern href="/ (ignoring escapes) in your file.
Sometimes it's easier to use something besides / for the search delimiter if your search has a lot of slashes, so you don't need to escape them all. Try replacing the / delimiter with # instead, like this:
s#href="/#href="http://website.com/folder/subfolder/#g
Then maybe you can more easily see what's wrong with your pattern:
becouse there are many '/' chars, try use another delimiter, ex ',':
:s,some/pattern/with/slashes,new/string,g
On another note. That substition worked for me. Just copied and pasted. Are you on the same line that you are trying to perform the substitution on? the 'g' is meant globally on the line you are on. If you need to perform the search and replace on the file the use :%s/
I need to parse the $PATH environment variable in my application.
So I was wondering what escape characters would be valid in $PATH.
I created a test directory called /bin:d and created a test script called funny inside it. It runs if I call it with an absolute path.
I just can't figure out how to escape : in $PATH I tried escaping the colon with \ and wrapping it into single ' and double " quotes. But always when I run which funny it can't find it.
I'm running CentOS 6.
This is impossible according to the POSIX standard. This is not a function of a specific shell, PATH handling is done within the execvp function in the C library. There is no provision for any kind of quoting.
This is the reason why including certain characters (anything not in the "portable filename character set" - colon is specifically called out as an example.) is strongly recommended against.
From SUSv7:
Since <colon> is a separator in this context, directory names that might be used in PATH should not include a <colon> character.
See also source of GLIBC execvp. We can see it uses the strchrnul and memcpy functions for processing the PATH components, with absolutely no provision for skipping over or unescaping any kind of escape character.
Looking at the function
extract_colon_unit
it seems to me that this is impossible. The : is unconditionally and
inescapably used as the path separator.
Well, this is valid at least for bash. Other shells may vary.
You could try mounting it
mount /bin:d /bind
PATH=/bind
According to http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/special-chars.html single quotes should preserve all special characters, so without trying it, I would think that '/bin:d' would work (with)in $PATH.
Assume we have a file /root/file.ini.
In Ubuntu's shell, we can show the content with this command,
less /root\\file.ini
However, in debian's shell, the command below will report that the file does not exist.
Does anybody happen to know how to make linux support "\\" as a path delimiter? I need to solve it because we have a software, which tries to access a file using "\\". It works fine in ubuntu, but not in debian.
Thanks
Linux cannot support \ as a path delimiter (though perhaps it might be able to with substantial changes to the kernel). This is because \ is a valid file name character. In fact the only characters not allowed as part of a file name are / and \0 (the null character).
If this seems to be working under ubuntu, then I would check for the existence of a file called root\file.ini in /
I believe you will probably find it easier to make your program platform independent.
I found this forum post which states / is a platform independent path delimiter in ANSI C any that file operations will automatically convert / to actual path delimiter used on the host OS.
have you tried "\\\\" (4 backslashes) first and third one for escaping and second and the last one to rule them all?
I've got a bunch of really big files that contain lines like:
convert ./1776/07/04/T915002.tif ./1776/07/04/T915002.png
rm ./1776/07/04/T915002.tif
convert ./1776/07/04/T918012.tif ./1776/07/04/T918012.png
rm ./1776/07/04/T918012.tif
What I want to do is search for say /1861/ meaning a line for the year 1861
But vim seems to interpret that 'go to line 1861, which is not at all what I want.
Searching for the ./1861/ fails too. I assume the leading dot tried to match any character. Trying to backslash quote it fails too. Clearly I'm missing a fundamental idea or two.
Thanks
You need a backslash to escape the dot or the slash:
/\.\/1861\/
Use ? to search backwards. This means you don't need to escape the /s.
?/1861/