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From: jso@edison.UUCP (John Owens)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Wildcard-specs
Message-ID: <877@edison.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 16-Oct-86 10:21:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: edison.877
Posted: Thu Oct 16 10:21:21 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Oct-86 03:42:20 EDT
References: <4162@brl-smoke.ARPA> <77@its63b.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: General Electric Company, Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 19
Summary: pattern matching shouldn't depend on the command!

In article <77@its63b.ed.ac.uk>, bob@its63b.ed.ac.uk (ERCF08 Bob Gray) writes:
> If I dig the code out of the archives, what sould happen in
> a command like
> 	cp **.c x
> 
> where x is a directory. Should the shell quietly make new
> directories or should it issue seperate cp commands for each
> target directory, then let cp complain if they don't exist.

The pattern matching can't depend on the command; besides not fitting
the UNIX philosophy at all, it would be ridiculously difficult in the
code.  The above pattern match would have to expand to:
	cp a.c s1/stop.c s2/s3/foobar.c x
and cp would do what it does today, namely create x/a.c x/stop.c and
x/foobar.c .

John Owens		General Electric Company - Charlottesville, VA
jso@edison.GE.COM	old arpa: jso%edison.GE.COM@seismo.CSS.GOV
+1 804 978 5726		old uucp: {seismo,decuac,houxm,calma}!edison!jso