Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!decwrl!pa.dec.com!bacchus!mwm From: mwm@pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.os.misc Subject: Re: Globbing Message-ID: Date: 20 Mar 91 00:49:59 GMT References: <17097@lanl.gov> <5H0ABE8@xds13.ferranti.com> Sender: news@pa.dec.com (News) Distribution: na Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 42 In-Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com's message of 19 Mar 91 15:47:46 GMT In article peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: Sigh. Teach me to not qualify my comments, will you? Take that! And that! Look, the point is that you can't do it without creating all sorts of problems, because (as you noted)... > All it takes are tools designed for handling multiple file arguments. ... it requires tools that take multiple arguments. On AmigaDOS, because the tools are written to do the globbing themselves, they don't. Fixed in 2.0. In any case, it doesn't create "all sorts of problems". Either the command accepts multiple arguments, in which case it works, or the command doesn't, in which case you get an error. It doesn't matter whether the shell did the globbing or some tool did it for the shell; it only depends on the command. > Maybe we should define globbing. The discussion seems to imply that > it's "regular expression matching against the local file system name > space," with specific arguments that matching against other parts of > the file system aren't globbing. A simple test shows that the file > system name space (local or not) isn't involved in this operation. Yes, the implementation sucks. Didn't I just say that? Um - I think we disagree about what "sucks" is. The AmigaDOS version sucks - it depends on the contents file system space. The csh version is done right - it lets you deal with arbitrary text. For example, the "group rename" hack is (slightly) easier with csh: ls *.x | sed 's/\(.*\)x$/mv \1{x,y}/' | /bin/csh Further, since doesn't depend on the filename space, I can use it in different contexts - like machine names and process id's (places where I do use it).