Shell Scripting

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What are the most inscrutable lines of $SHELL you've ever written? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm sure some of you have absolute monstrosities of sigils (I know I do, in my .zshrc alone). Post them without context, and try and guess what other users's lines are. If you want to provide context or guess, use the markdown editor to spoiler-tag your guesses and explanations!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

reply=( ${(M)dirs:#*/$~pattern}(Noe['REPLY=${(l[3][0])#REPLY:t}'][1]) )

Literal explanation

$~pattern interpret globbing characters (like *, ?, or [a-z]) in the parameter $pattern,
${(M)dirs:#*/$~pattern} filter the array $dirs to those matching */$~pattern.
${...}(...) everything in (...) are globbing qualifiers
(N) enable nullglob
(oe[...]) sort by the result of the shell snippet, where $REPLY is used as input and output
${...REPLY:t} remove all leading path components from $REPLY
${...#REPLY:t} substitute the length of that string
${(l[3][0])#REPLY:t} left-pad with zeroes to a length of 3
reply=( ... ) save as $reply

Full context

This line is in a function which dynamically expands ~[g:abc] to one of my git repos, choosing the shortest directory matching path/to/abc*, or if no match is found, the shortest matching *abc*. So between /long/path/to/abcdef and /short/abcdefg, it would choose the first one (provided both of those were in the search paths I configured).