Re: RFE: brace expansion sequences should do zero padding

[Martin von Gagern]

Hi again!

I saw my first post made it to the list eventually as well. Sorry for
the duplicate. I hadn't realized that the newsgroup was moderated.

I'm a bit dishearted at the lack of response. On IRC many people pointed
out that usually this kind of issue can be solved by passing a sequence
to printf. Now I've come up with a real life example that isn't easy to
hack together using printf:
wget -x http://some.really.long/url/prefix/{,{000..123}.{html,jpg}}

There have been some concerns about changing the behaviour and thus
breaking existing scripts. The preferred solution in this case would be
to use "..." instead of ".." if one wanted to activate this feature.
Personally I believe that zero padded sequences in an existing
application that cares for the exact string and not only the numeric
value are so unlikely that adding another piece of syntax is not worth
the trouble, but I'd like your opinion on this.

Another thing worth mentioning is negative numbers. My padding pads all
numbers to a common width, not a common number of digits. This is what
printf does, and it's a wee little bit easier to implement. However it
could be changed to common number of digits as well. On IRC I got the
idea that {-07..003} should do common width, whereas {-007..003} should
do common number of digits. This, however, would add a lot of code. I
think negative numbers are so rare that they are not worth the effort.
Do you agree?

I hope to generate some feedback here. If you think this useful, tell me
about it, and I'll try a bit harder to get this into the offical
sources. If I get no single answer this time as well, I'll probably post
the patch somewhere online, patch my own version of bash, and that's it.

Greetings,
 Martin von Gagern

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