Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!gatech!mcnc!decvax!decwrl!pyramid!prls!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Wildcard expansion in Turbo C
Keywords: glob, Turbo C
Message-ID: <2785@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: 25 Mar 88 15:56:46 GMT
References: <1282@nmtsun.nmt.edu> <329@gen1.UUCP> <977@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Ashton-Tate Corporation, East Hartford Development Center
Lines: 32

In article <977@mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) writes:
>In article <329@gen1.UUCP>, bob@gen1.UUCP (Robert Kamins) writes:
>> In <1282@nmtsun.nmt.edu>, greg@nmtsun.nmt.edu (Greg Lindhorst) writes:
>> I have a "glob" routine that does an MS-DOS wild-card expansion.  The
>> trouble with MS-DOS expansion is that you can't easily glob stuff
>> like "*c" and expect to get files with names like "ab.c".
>
>Yes.  And ugh.  One weekend when I had MS-DOS inflicted on me, I
>started to write a glob routine that behaved sensibly.

Please don't confuse "what I'm used to" with "sensible".  For those of us
who are accustomed to thinking of a file as a file name and a file type, it
is Un*x which does not behave "sensibly".  (And of the half dozen or so
systems I have used, all but Un*x take this approach.)

Note that if you want all your C files on MS-DOS, "*.c" works just fine.  I
don't think I have ever done a search where I wanted to match all and only
file names ending in "c".  On the other hand, with the name/extension
paradigm, I can search for "*." and find all the files with no extension.
No comparable Un*x search is possible.  (With full regular expression
searching, it is *possible*, but not worth it.)

This should not be taken as a flame against Un*x -- simple file names
permitting embedded "."s do have their advantages.  Nor should it be taken
as indicating that I consider MS-DOS a real operating system.  All I'm
saying is, try using the system as it was intended to be used, instead of as
a brain-damaged version of something else.  There are few design decisions
so bad that one cannot make some sort of productive use of them.
-- 

Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Ashton-Tate          52 Oakland Ave North         E. Hartford, CT 06108