Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!granite.pa.dec.com!mwm From: mwm@raven.pa.dec.com (Mike (Real Amiga have keyboard garages) Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Wildcards Message-ID: Date: 16 Mar 90 21:28:06 GMT References: <102618@linus.UUCP> <10210@cbmvax.commodore.com> Sender: news@decwrl.dec.com Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 33 In-reply-to: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com's message of 16 Mar 90 15:26:33 GMT In article <10210@cbmvax.commodore.com> daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes: Well, TriPos, basically. But the logic behind it is that, rather than simple wildcards, you have a reasonable regular expression language. The "*" convention would be a waste of a metacharacter. The one that's missing (but hopefully in 1.4) is a negation character. This brings up a point that has always annoyed me about Unix. It's got regular expression languages all over the place - ed, vi, sed, grep, awk, and others. They _all_ use the same basic languages, and many Eunices even have a library to provide these facilities, so that you get the same language everywhere. Except for file name globbing. There, "*" changes from meaning "zero or more of the previous pattern" to "zero or more of '?'", and the "." character becomes "?". This always seemed like a violation of the rule of least surprise. This should go on my 1.4 (1.5? 2.0?) wish list - that all standard commands that might want to deal with patterns accept the same regular expression language, and that filename wildcarding match that. It'd also be nice if the '#' operator moved to behind the expression where it belongs, but that's a minor nit.