I love using zsh—it’s full of completely insane features that you wouldn’t even think of using. Until you come across a situation and think: That’s exactly what I need!
Today’s example is recursive globbing. How to pick out all the non-image files in the current directory? I needed to run docs2unix over them. You could come up with some evil find command, but in zsh it looks like this:
% dos2unix **/*~*.(gif|png|jpg)(.)
**/*picks out all files and directories, recursively.~*.(gif|png|jpg)excludes images from that list.(.)ensures that only files and not directories are chosen.
Easy, peasy. :-)
Update: Even better, case insensitive globbing!
% dos2unix (#i)**/*~*.(gif|png|jpg)(.)
Jabbering Giraffe 