Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!kth.se!draken!d88-skl
From: d88-skl@nada.kth.se (Stellan Klebom)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Wildcards
Message-ID: <3138@draken.nada.kth.se>
Date: 15 Mar 90 14:04:14 GMT
References: <102618@linus.UUCP>
Reply-To: d88-skl@nada.kth.se (Stellan Klebom)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 60

In article <102618@linus.UUCP> duncant@mbunix.mitre.org (Thomson) writes:
>In article peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>...good ideas about wildcards omitted...
>>
>>Scripts would probably run with quotewild on by default, and the more powerful
>>amiga-style wildcards, and interactive shells would turn quotewild off and use
>>the terser unix-style wildcards.
>
>|I am surprised at the use of the phrase "more powerful amiga-style wildcards".
>More powerful than what?  Everything you can do with # and ? you can doo
>with * and ?, not jsut on unix, but also on VMS and (to some extent) on DOS.
>Note that VMS also allows a "wildcard" mechanism in path sepcifications, not
>just file names, so you can do much more flexible searches of directory trees
>for example.

The power of # is that you can apply it on an arbitrary regular expression.
That means that you for example can do dir #(Match|Me). And matching files
like "MatchMatchMatch","MatchMatchMatchMe","MeMatchMeMatchMatch", etc.
Now tell me how you can do that in UNIX or VMS? :-)

>I never understood where the AmigaDos wildcard conventions came from.  Why 
>deviate from a widely used convention in favor of a new one which noone is familiar with?

Neither can I, but I find Amiga DOS wilcards quite good. I just wish they
had made it like Apollo's.

>Personnally, I hope that the Amiga "#?" strangeness fades away with 1.4 and
>later releases.

I don't!! :-)

>Last, I have written a short routine name_match( pattern, string) which tests 
>whether the string matches a pattern, which may contain arbitrary * and ?
>wild cards.  I also use in my own programs a convention that "..."  in a
>path means "this directory and any subdirectories leading off it".  This
>would be handy to have as a standard Amiga convention, so that I could do 
>   COPY vol:dir/dir.../*foo?ar.* destination
>instead of ....  how Would you do this under DOS?

Well, here is the weakness of AmigaDos wildcards. The ... notation is missing.
I certainly hope for it in KS1.4.

>Duncan Thomson
>
>--
>(Please excuse the typos and garbage caused by line noise.)


        Stellan

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