Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale
From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: ls -A
Message-ID: <1989Oct7.191435.26382@rpi.edu>
Date: 7 Oct 89 19:14:35 GMT
References: <15@minya.UUCP> <14611@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
	<1989Oct7.032907.27496@rpi.edu> <1245@virtech.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 27

In <1245@virtech.UUCP> cpcahil@virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
Conor> The shell glob function must match the default operation of the
Conor> directory lister otherwise you will remove files that you are
Conor> not aware you are removing.  Once the decision was made on the
Conor> directory lister, there was no real choice on the shell
Conor> globber.

So you're saying then that the shell glob functions in a BSD universe
should check for uid 0 and expand * to all non-`.' and `..' entries in a
directory?  It doesn't:

rpi# ls
.cshrc      .newsrc     bin.server  lib         src
.forward    .nn         bin.sun3    man
.login      README      etc         spool
rpi# echo *
README bin.server bin.sun3 etc lib man spool src
rpi# which ls
/bin/ls

Darn those broken shells.  (To be fair, Conor didn't comment on
whether ls -A for root is "the right thing", but it does not have the
consistency he addressed in the article.)

Dave
-- 
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