[NTLUG:Discuss] Is this the way it's supposed to work?

[Chris Cox]

On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 02:01 -0500, Leroy Tennison wrote:
> (BTW, I'm running SuSE 10.3.)  Given a directory with the following 
> subdirectories (others removed for brevity):
> 
>     Desktop
>     Documents
> 
> Doing
> 
>     cd De*

Evaluates do Desktop if the above are the only directories
at the current level.

> 
> puts me in the Desktop subdirectory.  At this point doing
> 
>     cd ../Do*

The .. means parent directory of the current, then
Do* evaluates (matches) Documents.

> 
> puts me in the Documents directory.  Next, doing
> 
>     cd D*

Nope... assuming you're in the Documents directory,
you'd need to do cd ../D* ... UNLESS

you have CDPATH setup (echo $CDPATH).  Then, similar
to PATH, the CDPATH is searched when relative (non fully
qualified) change directory requests are given.  Since
cd D* isn't fully qualified, it looks local first then
it would peruse your CDPATH if set and see if it
can find a match.  You need to be careful with things
like CDPATH since it can take you to contexts that
are very outside what you're doing (resulting sometimes
in unexpected/sad results).

> 
> puts me in the Desktop subdirectory.
> 
> I first discovered this by accident in DOS under Windows then thought 
> "Is it the same under Linux?"  I think the 'cd D*' returns an error 
> under Windows, don't have a installed copy at home so I can't test.
> 
> 
>  From my DOS programming days (yes, I'm THAT old!) I remember findfirst 
> and findnext and thus understand what's probably going on behind the 
> scenes.  I'm just surprised that this kind of fuzziness exists in the 
> UI.  Bug or feature (or both)?