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From: bammi@cwruecmp.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: An interesting way to crash gulam shell
Message-ID: <2143@cwruecmp.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 7-Jun-87 20:40:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: cwruecmp.2143
Posted: Sun Jun  7 20:40:44 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jun-87 01:14:28 EDT
References: <505@myrias.UUCP>
Reply-To: bammi@cwruecmp.UUCP (Jwahar R. Bammi)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University
Lines: 36
Keywords: command line interpreter, shell

In article <505@myrias.UUCP> mj@myrias.UUCP (Michal Jaegermann) writes:
...............
>mkdir testd
>mkdir testd\expmd
>ls -l >testd\dirf   # this for better effect
>cp testd\* testd\expmd
>
>Now lean back and watch effects.   There is nothing, short of resetting
>your computer, that you can do anyway.   (It will create a recursive
>structure of subdirectories which you cannot remove, since rm command
>does not have either -r or -f option.   GEM will also barf on you after
>a short while, coming with nonsense error messages).
>   I believe that this bug is closely related to 'rm *', mentioned by
>John Turner.
>

	From my perspective the answer is Yes and No. Let me try and
explain. In Gulam the filename regular expressions are UNIX style
filename regular expressions and NOT Gemdos style regular expressions.
So a '*' matches all files in $cwd. Therefore 'whatever *' will also
match the names of all subdirectories in $cwd. In newer versions of
Gulam, one of the things that has been fixed is that rm and other
commands that do not deal with directories will skip them if given
directories as args (the command line expansion is done before it is known
what command is going to use the args), instead of barfing at them.
One of the features of the 'cp' command is that if it is given the
name of a directory as the source arguement, then it will copy the
entire directory to the destination (if the destination is also
a directory). But your example is a good one, and shows up a problem
in this scheme of things. It'll be interesting to see what solution
Prabhaker come up with.
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