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From: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: copying files
Message-ID: <8492@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 12 Dec 90 18:49:26 GMT
References: <4914@mahendo.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <110253@convex.convex.com> <1990Dec11.125018.12274@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> <110398@convex.convex.com>
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Reply-To: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Organization: VU Dept. of Computer Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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In article <110398@convex.convex.com>,
	tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
)In article <1990Dec11.125018.12274@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> chet@po.CWRU.Edu writes:
):In article <110253@convex.convex.com> I wrote:
):>The ! syntax for exclusion isn't very much in line with other regexps.
):>The tcsh allows *.[^ao] for all the *.? where ? is not a or o.
)
):The Bourne and Korn shells support it, as do bash and ash.  It has been
):blessed by Posix.
)
)Which one, the bang one!!??  That's really idiotic if so, and it hasn't
)been voted on yet.  If the ^ one, then great, that's very unusally 
)forward thinking of them; nice to see them do something that actually
)looks like other things in UNIX for a change.
)
)Which it it?  Do I get to flame or cheer?

You get both.  Cheers because you'd prefer `^', flames because the `!' is
_existing_ practice (in System V).  Why was it chosen in the first place?
Well, the `^' is an ancient synonym for `|'!  Try it out yourself!

It's been a mistake in the first place to allow 3 different pattern
matching/file globbing syntaxes to be developed, but such is life.
--
In the Bourne shell syntax tabs and spaces are equivalent almost everywhere.
The exception: _indented_ here documents.  :-(
Does anyone remember the famous mistake Makefile-novices often make?