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

[Leroy Tennison]

Chris Cox wrote:
> 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)?
> 
> 
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> 
Yea, I fouled up on the 'cd D*', I had changed back to the parent.  It's 
what I get for composing emails way too early in the morning...