Question

Here is the directory structure of the folder I am trying to archive:

DIR STRUCTURE

HOME
HOME/.abc
HOME/FIRST
HOME/FIRST/.def

I am using simlpe $PATCH/zip -r -l -x "bac*" abc.zip HOME/*

One interesting thing I obseverved was it is skipping hidden folder directly under HOME and it zips the one under FIRST. What am I missing here? Is it any side effect of the options I am chosing ? Please help thanks in advance.

Answer 1

* is not interpreted by the zip utility, but rather expanded by the shell. Before the zip utility is executed, * is replaced by a space separated list of all the non-hidden files or directories.

You can prove this by replacing $PATCH/zip with echo, which will show the arguments that are actually passed to the program, after shell mangling.

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If you set the environment variable GLOBIGNORE to .:.., not only will bash disable the matching of . and .., it has the nice effect of also automatically enabling ‘dotglob’, which matches the other hidden files without the need for .*, so you can just use * for everything.

For example, this should solve your problem:

GLOBIGNORE=.:..; $PATCH/zip -r -l -x "bac*" abc.zip HOME/*; unset GLOBIGNORE

Note that you cannot do this the short way, or in one command:

GLOBIGNORE=.:.. $PATCH/zip -r -l -x "bac*" abc.zip HOME/*

It seems that bash doesn’t notice this until the next command.