So far I have found some examples of Bash select function usage with logical constructed options or Asterisk one (i.e select s in *). This last one lists all actual directory content.
So I would like to understand the following:
What does * mean?
How could I display another directory content?
(I tried something as opt=$( ls path ) and select s in "$opt[@]", but it fails)
Any related links or examples are welcome.
The * is a so-called "glob" and will be expanded by the bash as "all files in the current directory", so it will basically expand to a space-separated list of all files in the current directory (which is the format commonly expected by many bash builtin flow-control constructs).
Globs can be used not only stand-alone but also as part of expressions, so assuming you have a directory stored in a bash variable $searchdir (be careful in naming bash variables in order not to accidentally overwrite essential environment variables such as $PATH) the construct
select s in "$searchdir"/*
will expand to "all files in $searchdir".
Note, however, that if the directory happens to be empty, the expression will amount to a literal * (or literally /the/actual/value/pointed/to/by/searchdir/*) unless you have set the nullglob option via
shopt -s nullglob
Then, if the directory is empty, the glob construct will expand to an empty list which is usually what you will want.
