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From: jpc@fct.unl.pt (Jose Pina Coelho)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.introduction
Subject: Re: Wildcards in the CLI
Message-ID: <JPC.91May8162234@terra.fct.unl.pt>
Date: 8 May 91 16:22:34 GMT
Article-I.D.: terra.JPC.91May8162234
References: <1991Apr25.100919.21595@fwi.uva.nl> <21179@cbmvax.commodore.com>
	<mstgil.673311266@sol <1991May7.003043.8751@bilver.uucp>
	<MWM.91May7110230@raven.pa.dec.com>
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Organization: Universidade Nova de Lisboa -- Lisbon, Portugal
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In-Reply-To: mwm@pa.dec.com's message of 7 May 91 15:02:30 GMT


In article <MWM.91May7110230@raven.pa.dec.com> mwm@pa.dec.com (Mike
(My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) writes: 
>
>      >Copy files [to] [file/dir]
>      >           ^^^^ why the f*** ?
>
>      Because one could want to specify the parameters in a different order.  For
>      example, "copy to destination from source".
>
>   For utilities that generate command lines, this is what makes the
>   multi-source-file version copy work reasonably.

For those utilities, in unix, you find a powerfull mix of awk, sed,
find & perl, on the other hand, in UNIX, it's the shell that is in
charge of expanding the wild names, leaving the programs with an easy
interface and simple works.

when you do 'ls *.c' the shell will build a list of the files that
match the expression, and will call ls with those arguments.  Only if
there are no matches, will ls get *.c, which it will try to copy, and
fial with 'cp: *.c: No such file or directory'

>   For instance, on unix, to move all the .c files out of a directory
>   requires exec'ing one cp per file, even though cp takes multiple
>   arguments. You do:
>
>	   find . -name '*.c' -exec cp '{}' dest \;

That finds all files that match a pattern in a directory tree (bellow
us) and execs copy for each file that does, that's slow, you have
quite better options:

 find . -type d -print | awk '{ printf "cp %s/*.c dest\n", $0 }' | sh

this will: Find all dirs, Create a command line to copy from each dir,
pass them, to the shell for wildcard expansion and execution.

 for i in `find . -type d -print`
 do
	cp $i/*.c dest
 done

>
>   If Unix had an AmigaDOS 2.0 copy, you could do it with a single
>   invocation of copy as:
>
>	   find . -name '*.c' -print | xargs copy to dest

You can do that as:
	cp `find . -name '*.c' -print` dest
or (depends on your shell flavour)
	cp $(find . -name '*.c' -print) dest


What I was barfing at was mostly the [to], it has no business there.
If I want to copy something then I must tell WHERE to, and it can be
only one thing, the last one (or the first one, though