ls -A

[Michael DeCorte]

In article <1989Oct7.032907.27496 at rpi.edu> tale at pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes:

>No it wouldn't.   rm already does special treatment of `.' and `..'.
>Some form of special treatment by shell expansion of * wasn't
>"necessary" at all.

how about:
grep foo * 
cat * | foo
tar -cf - * # opps grab . and .. in this one plus all the local files twice
echo * | cpio -o > /dev/tape # see above

sure if you want to be consistent then the shell include . files
but it often (usaully?) not what you want it to do.

Plus I really don't want to see the 51 .* files that I have in my ~
directory (yes I really do have 51 of them) so if you make the shell
and ls list .* files I am going to has for a hidden bit in the inode.
But this isn't what I really want I want the hidden bit in the
directory because of the wonders of links so lets throw out the entire
concept of inodes and shove it all in the directory.  Hmmm this seems
to make a few changes in the file system.  wonder what the people at
<pick your maker of Unix> will think?

To see a moderately flawed but still interesting article on the argument
of consistency vs. most usefull behavior see this months's CACM.

--

Michael DeCorte // H215-546-0497 W386-8164 Fax386-8252 // mrd at clutx.bitnet
2300 Naudain St. "H", Phil, PA 19146 // mrd at sun.soe.clarkson.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clarkson Archive Server // commands = help, index, send, path
archive-server at sun.soe.clarkson.edu
archive-server%sun.soe.clarkson.edu at omnigate.bitnet
dumb1!dumb2!dumb3!smart!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!archive-server
---------------------------------------------------------------------------