On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Paul Hartman
>> <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>> * One of my machines is giving an undesired response in eselect:
>>>>
>>>> c2stable ~ # eselect binutils list
>>>> !!! Error: Pattern *does not match any installed version of binutils!
>>>> exiting
>>>> c2stable ~ #
>>>
>>> Mine does the same thing on 1 computer but works on 2 others. All with
>>> the same versions of all involved packages. Weird.
>>>
>>
>> Hey, at least I'm in good company if my old friend Paul Hartman sees
>> the same thing. :-)
>>
>> There is a patch to the binutils.eselect file here that worked for me:
>>
>> https://423525.bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=316441
>>
>> Before patching (if you do at all - I recommend you don't patch unless
>> you just want to) run this command in the directory you are running
>> eselect in. (For me it was just /root)
>>
>> echo -*
>>
>> On a 'good' machine it returns
>>
>> -q
>>
>> On a 'bad' machine here it returns
>>
>> --help -q
>>
>> I don't think the machine is really bad. I think eselect was likely
>> just not being selective enough about how it works with whatever is in
>> the directory or search path? Not sure.
>>
>> If you see something different you might add it to the bug report but
>> I suspect we've got the same issue.
>
> Ah-ha. When I run the command from a directory which does not contain
> any files or dirs starting with hyphen, it is fine. In my user dir
> there is ~/- directory for some reason, so that must have been
> confusing it.
>

Yes, same here.

rm -- -q
rm -- --help

and now eselect binutils list works fine.

The devs have now patched eselect in git to fix this in a future
release. In my case I suspect that I executed some command where I was
looking for help (--help) but the command was mistyped and I got a
file as output, etc. Not sure how you got a directory but if there's
nothing in it you care about then I suppose

rm -- ~/-

would clean it up and eselect would probably work for you also.

Cheers,
Mark