[arp242]

Languages like Ruby, Perl, and PHP have a backtick that can be used for that; for example in Ruby:

    >> files = `ls / | grep ^b`.split("\n")
    => ["bin", "books", "boot"]
    >> p $?
    #<Process::Status: pid 10889 exit 0>

    >> `false`
    => ""
    >> p $?
    #<Process::Status: pid 10898 exit 1>

I don't use it a lot because I don't feel like installing Ruby just for a few scripts, and zsh solves enough of the problems for me anyway.

Also parsing ls output isn't necessarily a good idea, and what you really miss is "first class globbing" like:

  for f in /b*; [..]
  arr=(/b*)

[twic]

Backticks are going in the right direction, but not quite it. I want to operate on lists (or iterables etc), not strings, so i have all the usual safe and convenient facilities of the language available to build them. I want to get an object back that is extremely easy to get various kinds of results out of (Python's subprocess object isn't; i'm not familiar with Ruby's). I want more aggressive raise_for_status style error checking.

Thinking about it, this doesn't need to be an operator, and i could probably just write this myself and start trying it.

Interesting point about globbing. My feeling is that i don't actually use it a lot in scripts - the criteria for matching are usually complicated enough that i'm much more likely to use find. In a project with 1376 non-comment lines of shell script, i found eleven uses of globbing.