Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!olivea!tymix!cirrusl!ss168!dhesi From: dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc Subject: Re: Globbing Message-ID: <2997@cirrusl.UUCP> Date: 12 Mar 91 00:08:41 GMT References: <43995@cos.com> Sender: news@cirrusl.UUCP Organization: Cirrus Logic Inc. Lines: 22 In mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst) writes: >If you need to be convinced that taking globbing out of the shell is a >Bad Thing, just look at MS-DOS. MS-DOS has never done wildcard >globbing for you, and as a result, you have about sixteen thousand >different wildcard expansion schemes out there. Actually the whole truth is that (a) MS-DOS provides a somewhat flaky system call that does do globbing for you, but that (b) it is rather inconvenient to use this system call, and it has bugs to preserve compatibility with CP/M, whose corresponding system call also had bugs. So the reason that programmers invent their own globbing schemes under MS-DOS is not because the MS-DOS shell doesn't do it, but because the system call provided does it so badly. If the system call did a better job, programmers would use it, because it would be more convenient than rolling their own. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: oliveb!cirrusl!dhesi