Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnewsc!gregg
From: gregg@cbnewsc.att.com (gregg.g.wonderly)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: PIPEs
Message-ID: <1990Nov4.150403.28982@cbnewsc.att.com>
Date: 4 Nov 90 15:04:03 GMT
References: <1990Nov4.072423.408@agate.berkeley.edu>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 30

From article <1990Nov4.072423.408@agate.berkeley.edu>, by pete@violet.berkeley.edu (Pete Goodeve):
> At least this is the case if you insist on a
> space preceding it (as you need before '>' redirection), because a pattern
> can never BEGIN with an alternation mark.  (Quotes and parentheses would
> have to be taken into account naturally.)
> 
>         list #?.c|???.h | myformatter |myprinter
> 
> Any other problems?  If not, I withdraw my objections.

I find the UN*X shells' quoting conventions to be quite adequate at
avoiding the need to require a SPACE anywhere.  If you want something which
contains meta characters to become part of a parameter-word, you quote it.
That makes it pretty simple to put together whatever you need.

grep some-text *.c
egrep "some-text|other-text|other-text" *.c

etc.

Of course the biggest part of this is educating people which characters
are special meta-characters which the shell will treat in a special way.

I usually just tell people, when you want a character that is not a
letter or digit to be a part of a parameter to a program, just quote it.
This results in no surprises.

-- 
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gregg.g.wonderly@att.com   (AT&T bell laboratories)