I am using tcsh and define an environmental variable as follows:
setenv mycomp
so that when I need to copy files from the remote my.computer.com, I type the following:
scp $mycomp:sourcepath destpath
But when I do this, I get the following error: "Bad : modifier in $ (m)." where (m) is the first character after the colon.
What is this error telling me, and how can I fix it?
2 Answers
Variable expansion with a colon after it treats the letters after the colon as modifiers.
For example, $dir:h means expand $dir with the h modifier. h means head, i.e. all but the last part of the path.
% set dir=/home/user
% echo $dir:h
/home
All the info is in the tcsh(1) man page:
History substitution
...
The word or words in a history reference can be edited, or ‘‘modi-
fied’’, by following it with one or more modifiers, each preceded by a
‘:’:
h Remove a trailing pathname component, leaving the head.
t Remove all leading pathname components, leaving the tail.
r Remove a filename extension ‘.xxx’, leaving the root name.
e Remove all but the extension.
u Uppercase the first lowercase letter.
l Lowercase the first uppercase letter.
s/l/r/ Substitute l for r.
...
Variable substitution
...
The ‘:’ modifiers described under History substitution, except for
‘:p’, can be applied to the substitutions above.
You can avoid the modifier by wrapping the variable name in braces, e.g.
scp ${mycomp}:sourcepath destpath
While I don't have a tcsh environment to test this out I'd guess that when the shell is looking for your environment variable, it is not splitting out on the : and looking for $mycomp:sourcepath as the whole variable name.
I would try aliasing out your scp command.
