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i got this snippet from a shell script , it run perfectly in Solaris environment 

grep -h '??.*??' $1/{CT,{MYDIR{85,97}}{,_E}}/R*txt

but when i try to run shell script in ubuntu , it gives following error

grep: ./{MYDIR85}/R*txt: No such file or directory
grep: ./{MYDIR85}_E/R*txt: No such file or directory

after little bit of editing it run properly, i removed curly braces of MYDIR 

grep -h '??.*??' $1/{CT,MYDIR{85,97} {,_E}}  /R*txt

I want to know what is the problem , is it command incompatibility between linux and solaris ?

Note -i have three directory MYDIR85 , MYDIR97 and CT - in ubuntu , shell is /bin/bash - in solaris i don't know the shell type,but the first line of shell script is #!/bin/bash

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  • 1
    update to include details of shell used on solaris vs linux, e.g. echo $SHELL ? Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 15:02
  • is $1 set ? curly brace are fine in ubuntu. try setting shopt -s nullglob. Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 15:03
  • Sounds like a csh thing to me - see for example Why doesn't bash treat brace expansions exactly like csh? Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 15:08
  • @steve i updated my question Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 15:09
  • @Archemar yes i pass dot . Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 15:10

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According to the bash manpages

A correctly-formed brace expansion must contain unquoted opening and closing braces, and at least one unquoted comma or a valid sequence expression. Any incorrectly formed brace expansion is left unchanged.

In your expression {MYDIR{85,97}}, the outer brace has neither an unquoted comma nor a sequence expression, so is left unexpanded - resulting in {MYDIR85} {MYDIR97}. Just for the sake of illustration, you can get the desired behavior by adding a trailing comma:

bash $ echo {MYDIR{85,97},}
MYDIR85 MYDIR97

although this would introduce an extra - presumably unwanted - _E element into your compounded expression {CT,{MYDIR{85,97}}{,_E}}.

I don't know why you're seeing different behavior under Solaris, except to note that csh does remove the outer braces under this condition (although it also accepts the trailing comma form - as do ksh and zsh apparently):

csh % echo {MYDIR{85,97}}
MYDIR85 MYDIR97
csh % echo {MYDIR{85,97},}
MYDIR85 MYDIR97
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