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From: swalton@solaria.csun.edu (Stephen Walton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: AmigaDOS patterns with '~'
Message-ID: <1991Jan29.172553.421@csun.edu>
Date: 29 Jan 91 17:25:53 GMT
References: <04348.AA04348@ami-cg.UUCP> <17879@cbmvax.commodore.com> <ROSENBER.91Jan24163004@ra.abo.fi> <18132@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Sender: news@csun.edu (News Administrator)
Reply-To: swalton@solaria.csun.edu (Stephen Walton)
Organization: Cal State Northridge
Lines: 18
In-Reply-To: jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup)

In article <18132@cbmvax.commodore.com>, jesup@cbmvax (Randell Jesup) writes:

>	There was supposed to be a specific hack in the patternmatch code
>to do something special with a final ~.  Certainly it shouldn't silently
>eat it (VERY bad).  I'll look into it;

I agree with Randell's later comment that regular expressions can be
mind warping.  However, the behavior of the final ~ is consistent, I
think.  Since ~ NOT's the following expression, the string #?~ matches
everything (that is, it matches all file names which consist of any
string followed by not-the-null-string).

The best fix is probably to modify Emacs-ish editors to use a different
backup scheme so they don't collide with an Amiga wildcard character.
After all, you wouldn't end your backups on Unix with an asterisk,
would you :-) ?

Steve