argv and command line

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From ucsfcgl!sdcarl!dgl at Berkeley Thu Nov 12 21:13:01 1981
One can of course get the bare command line by having the user
double-quote the appropriate part of the line.  The disadvantage
to this is that such programs must be handled separately in the minds
of the users, which is too bad.  

The real screw is that the shell aborts if it doesn't
find a filename match.  There is no way for the shell to know
whether a program can function as the user intended if the user supplies
a filename pattern but there are no files that match.
So this is reasonable behavior on the part of
the shell (although it can be argued that all programs should protect
themselves against funny or nonexistant input anyway).  

A special hack would have to
be added to the shell, namely, a list of programs which, when named
as commands, signals the shell to not expand regular expressions.
A mechanism similar to "set path" would do.  It would be a wonderful
capability to have.  The next most obvious question is, how much of
the shell's syntax would you suppress?  Just filename parsing?  Or
also the rest of the shell's syntax?  Presumably just the filename
parsing would be most advantageous.