I’m sure some of you have absolute monstrosities of sigils (I know I do, in my .zshrc alone). Post them without context, and try and guess what other users’s lines are. If you want to provide context or guess, use the markdown editor to spoiler-tag your guesses and explanations!
Literal explanation
$~pattern
interpret globbing characters (like*
,?
, or[a-z]
) in the parameter$pattern
,${(M)dirs:#*/$~pattern}
filter the array$dirs
to those matching*/$~pattern
.${...}(...)
everything in(...)
are globbing qualifiers(N)
enablenullglob
(oe[...])
sort by the result of the shell snippet, where $REPLY is used as input and output${...REPLY:t}
remove all leading path components from $REPLY${...#REPLY:t}
substitute the length of that string${(l[3][0])#REPLY:t}
left-pad with zeroes to a length of 3reply=( ... )
save as$reply
Full context
This line is in a function which dynamically expands
~[g:abc]
to one of my git repos, choosing the shortest directory matchingpath/to/abc*
, or if no match is found, the shortest matching*abc*
. So between/long/path/to/abcdef
and/short/abcdefg
, it would choose the first one (provided both of those were in the search paths I configured).