Globbing
Marc Unangst
mju at mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us
Mon Mar 11 15:28:36 AEST 1991
fetter at cos.com (Bob Fetter) writes:
> different story. Whether this is a 'good thing' in today's Unix world
> is yet another question.
If you need to be convinced that taking globbing out of the shell is a
Bad Thing, just look at MS-DOS. MS-DOS has never done wildcard
globbing for you, and as a result, you have about sixteen thousand
different wildcard expansion schemes out there. Some programs don't
even support wildcards. Some do, but don't support things like
"*/file" (i.e., a wildcarded directory name). Some make you type
"*.*" if you mean "all files", and some accept "*" for "all files".
(Programs of the former type usually take "*" to mean "all files
without an extension".)
But definitely the best are the programs that follow COMMAND.COM's
lead in expanding wildcards -- "*word*" is the same as "*", which
means if you type "del *foo*.bar", you will REALLY delete "*.bar".
It's a pain in the ass to remember which programs use which globbing
schemes. And it can cause actual damage, if you can't remember what
globbing scheme a program uses and do something like the
aforementioned "del *foo*.bar". I'd *much* prefer that the shell do
the globbing -- at least then, you have some sort of consistancy.
--
Marc Unangst |
mju at mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us | "Bus error: passengers dumped"
...!umich!leebai!mudos!mju |
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