Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rpi!rpi.edu!tale From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug Subject: Re: Bug/Feature in globbing Message-ID: Date: 14 Jul 89 15:20:22 GMT References: <5476@videovax.tv.Tek.com> <8907141311.AA07040@aurel.caltech.edu> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu Distribution: gnu Lines: 26 In-reply-to: bfox@AUREL.CALTECH.EDU's message of 14 Jul 89 13:11:37 GMT From: tektronix!tekcrl!tekfdi!videovax!bart@cis.ohio-state.edu (Bart Massey) Bart> for i in * Bart> do Bart> cat $i Bart> done In <8907141311.AA07040@aurel.caltech.edu> bfox@AUREL.CALTECH.EDU (Brian Fox): BF> I'm really amazed that you would want this behaviour. In the above `for' BF> command, with "nullglobok" non-null, and no files in the current BF> directory, the `cat' would hang, waiting for input, since `$i' would BF> expand to nothing. Ugh. I've never come up against a for loops that started with a null item in sh programming, but is that really what it is supposed to do? It seems to me that in the interests of logical sensibility and similarity to many existing languages it shouldn't even enter the for loop because it has nothing with which to iterate. (Yes, I know the "existing languages" argument falls apart with those languages which will always execute a for loop at least once even when the terminating condition is already met. That always seemed like broken behaviour to me.) Dave -- (setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@itsgw.rpi.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))