A while ago I wrote this loop in a zsh script, and now I don't remember what it does, and I need to convert this script to run in sh.
for f in ${HOME}/.dotfiles/files/*(N) ${HOME}/.dotfiles/files/.*(N); do symlink_prompt $(basename $f) done Can someone help me understand what this does, and how I can duplicate it in sh syntax?
The glob qualifier (N) causes the pattern to disappear entirely should it fail to match any files. There is no directly equivalent in POSIX shell; instead, you should simply check if f actually exists and continue if it does not. (If the pattern fails to match any files, f takes the literal pattern as its value instead.)
for f in "$HOME"/.dotfiles/files/* "$HOME"/.dotfiles/files/.*; do [ -e "$f" ] || continue symlink_prompt "$(basename "$f")" done If you are actually using bash, you can set the nullglob option instead.
shopt -s nullglob for f in "$HOME"/.dotfiles/files/* "$HOME"/.dotfiles/files/.*; do symlink_prompt "$(basename "$f")" done 
[ -e "$f" ] || continue line. The fact that && and || as control structures is idiomatic in shell scripting is just crazy to me.
"$HOME"/.dotfiles/files/.* will match . and ...
for f in .* *; do symlink_prompt $(basename $f) ; done(N)modifier of zsh. You can leave out the modifier, but if you have no matches for the pattern, you will get an message on stderr, and you will need to test inside the loop for the existence of the file. Also, in Posix shell you need to write$(basename "$f"), just in casefcontains white space.