Creating a New Post for Octopress from Zsh

A couple of years back, I made the switch from bash to zsh. I did so mainly because I saw a fantastic post on customizing the command prompt that I dove into head first, and I’ve stuck with it for the slightly improved tab completion. Your mileage may vary with regards to zsh, but I always find it difficult to do without it when I end up working on somebody else’s machine. Despite the improvement, there are a few differences between the shells, and I’ve come across a scipt or two that wasn’t especially zsh friendly. One of those is the very rake task that created this blog post.

To create a post in Octopress from bash, you simply need to run the command:

rake new_post[“One man forgot to account for zsh…”]

Running the same command from zsh leaves you with a cryptic error:

zsh: no matches found: new_post[One man forgot to account for zsh…]

Zsh escapes the quotes necessary to name the new blog post, as you can see by the error that is output. The syntax that creates a blog post in bash causes zsh to begin attempting to match a filename.

To create a post in Octopress from zsh, you simply need to run the command:

rake “new_post[One man forgot to account for zsh…]”

It’s a minor inconvenience, and one that could probably be solved by some extended documentation on the Octopress site. No harm, no foul; zsh Octopress bloggers just need to remember the change in syntax.

Any other zsh tips for Octopress? Or any noteworthy zsh “workarounds” to share? Drop them in comments.