Question

I want to execute following command in shell script

cp /somedire/*.(txt|xml|xsd) /destination/dir/

But this does not run inside shell script. Any quick help?

createjob.sh: line 11: syntax error near unexpected token `(‘

My shell is zsh.

Thanks
Nayn

Answer 1

Your use of parentheses and alternation is a zsh-specific construct. It doesn’t work in other shells, including zsh in sh compatibility mode.

If you want to keep using this construct, you’ll have to invoke zsh as zsh (presumably by replacing #!/bin/sh by #!/bin/zsh or something like that).

If you need your script to run on ksh, use #!/bin/ksh or #!/usr/bin/env ksh and

cp /somedire/*.@(txt|xml|xsd) /destination/dir/

If you also need to support bash, that same command with the @ will work provided you run the following commands first:

shopt -s extglob 2>/dev/null  ## tell bash to parse ksh globbing extensions
setopt ksh_glob 2>/dev/null   ## tell zsh to parse ksh globbing extensions

If you need POSIX sh compatibility, you’ll have to use three separate commands, and prepare for an error message if any of the three extensions has no match. A more robust solution would use find:

find /somedire -name /somedire -o -type d -prune -o \
     \( -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.xml' -o '*.xsd' \) \
     -exec sh -c 'cp "$@" "$0"' /destination/dir {} +