openssh bugs - May 2010 - [Bug 1767] New: Inconsistend wildcard expansion in 'ls *'

https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1767

           Summary: Inconsistend wildcard expansion in 'ls *'
           Product: Portable OpenSSH
           Version: 5.5p1
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: sftp
        AssignedTo: unassigned-bugs at mindrot.org
        ReportedBy: gtrenin at gmail.com


They way wilcard expansion is done in 'ls *' depends on the number of
files in the current directory.
If there are two or more files/subdirs in the current directory, 'ls *'
produces the list of current directory (this is ok).
But if there is only one subdirectory in the current directory, 'ls *'
also  produces the list of files in this subdirectory.
This is inconsistent approach to my mind.

Steps to reproduce:

$ touch file1 file2
$ sftp user at host
Connected to host.
Changing to: /home/user/
sftp> mkdir test
sftp> cd test 
sftp> mkdir dir1
sftp> mkdir dir2
sftp> put file* dir1
Uploading file1 to /home/user/test/dir1/file1
Uploading file2 to /home/user/test/dir1/file2
sftp> ls -1 *
dir1/
dir2/

Note the result of the above command. Assume this is a correct
behaviour. Now we'll remove dir2 and see how 'ls -1 *' output
changes.
I expect to see only 'dir1/' in the output.

sftp> rmdir dir2
sftp> ls -1 *
dir1/file1
dir1/file2
sftp> 

We can see that the output is quite different from our expectations.
It showed 'dir1/file1  dir1/file2' instead of 'dir1/'.

This bug appeared in somewhere around OpenSSH_4.2p1, maybe a little bit
earlier. It is still present in OpenSSH_5.5p1-snap20100505.

This bug does NOT present in OpenSSH_3.8.1p1.

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https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1767

Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |djm at mindrot.org

--- Comment #1 from Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org>  ---
This is the special case code:

   755  /*
   756   * If the glob returns a single match and it is a directory,
   757   * then just list its contents.
   758   */
   759   if (g.gl_matchc == 1) {
   760       if ((a = do_lstat(conn, g.gl_pathv[0], 1)) == NULL) {
   761           globfree(&g);
   762           return (-1);
   763       }
   764       if ((a->flags & SSH2_FILEXFER_ATTR_PERMISSIONS) &&
   765           S_ISDIR(a->perm)) {
   766                int err;
   767  
   768                err = do_ls_dir(conn, g.gl_pathv[0], strip_path,
 lflag);
   769                globfree(&g);
   770                return (err);
   771       }
   772   }

Arguably, the special case behaviour is more consistent with a normal
shell when executing "ls *"

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https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1767

--- Comment #2 from Grigory <gtrenin at gmail.com>  ---
This behaviour is confusing for scripts that invoke sftp in batch mode.
"ls -1 *" is a convenient way for a script to differ directories from
files because directories are marked by '/' in the end of them.

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