How do you shell expand your variables and why?

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Gamma@programming.dev · 1 year ago

Gamma@programming.dev · edit-2 1 year ago

I typically use find "$HOME/docs", but with a few caveats:

In Zsh or Fish, the quotes are unnecessary: find $HOME/docs
If I’m using anything potentially destructive: mv "${HOME:?}/bin" ...
Of course, if it’s followed by a valid identifier character, I’ll add braces: "${basename}_$num.txt"
I’m pretty inconsistent when globbing: "$HOME"/docs/* or "$HOME/docs/"* are common for me.
I don’t use "${HOME}" unless I actually need the braces. The reason? I write more Zsh than anything, and the braces are even less necessary in Zsh: $#array[3] actually gets the length of the third element of the array, rather than substituting the number of arguments, then the string 'array[3]'