shell brace expansion (was "regex help")

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Tim again, replying inline

> whatever's in the braces is treated as a comma separated array of
> strings and whatever string the braces are part of gets duplicated
> for each entry in the array

Exactly.

> multiple sets of braces, a test I just did suggests the expansion
> covers the entire Cartesian product

Also correct.

> Is there a way to define a range? I tried:

As Didier pointed out, this functionality isn't defined in POSIX, so
it depends on which shell you're using.  In most Linux distros, that's
bash which has both the above string brace-expansion, as well as
numeric-range expansion:

  $ echo {1..5}
  1 2 3 4 5
  $ echo {1..10..2}
  1 3 5 7 9
  $ echo {5..1}
  5 4 3 2 1
  $ echo {10..1..-2}
  10 8 6 4 2

whereas under the ksh shell on my OpenBSD box, it supports the string
brace-expansion, but not the numerical-range form.

So for some test cases, I've been known to use that Cartesian product
to do things like

  $ mkdir -p {a,b,c}/{x,y,z}
  $ echo hello | tee {a,b,c}/{x,y,z}/{1..5}

which produces 45 files in nested directories.

-Tim