Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!usc!apple!sun-barr!texsun!letni!merch!cpe!hal6000!trsvax!don
From: don@trsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: What interprets *.*
Message-ID: <216100149@trsvax>
Date: 20 Sep 89 22:02:00 GMT
References: <32164@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Lines: 24
Nf-ID: #R:ames.arc.nasa.gov:32164:trsvax:216100149:000:1151
Nf-From: trsvax.UUCP!don    Sep 20 17:02:00 1989


 >>In Unix, it is the shell that interprets the character *, what in
 >>DOS will do the same thing?  Is it left to the Command.com, or is it
 >>left to each utility to do on its own?

>Each program has to do it on its own.  This is actually much worse
>than COMMAND.COM doing it for you, because then you have differing
>interpretations of things like "*89.*" (does it mean "*.*", like
>COMMAND.COM thinks it does, or "any file with `89' in the name",
>like some other utilities do?), plus the bother of having to code the
>wildcard handling into programs that you write.

WRONG!!!  Each program *may* do its own thing, but DOS does not *require*
it.  Command.com passes the parameter directly to interrupt 21h functions
4Eh (find first matching file) and 4Fh (find next matching file).
If a programmer does not like the DOS interpretation, he/she is free to
interpret the wildcard directly and then pass the processed filenames to
DOS.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Don Subt			The opinions expressed above are
Tandy Corp.			strictly mine, not my employer's.

817-390-3068			...!texbell!letni!rwsys!trsvax!don