Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!uwmcsd1!marque!introl!dworld!nic
From: nic@dworld.UUCP (Nic Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: ARP 1.1 Copy command
Message-ID: <428@dworld.UUCP>
Date: 2 May 88 19:43:39 GMT
References: <8008@pur-ee.UUCP> <340@draken.nada.kth.se>
Reply-To: nic@dworld.UUCP (Nic Bernstein)
Organization: Discovery World: Museum of Science, Economics and Technology inc.
Lines: 50
Keywords: ARP Copy
Summary: Read the docs, people.

In article <340@draken.nada.kth.se> nordmark@epsilon.stacken.kth.se (Gunnar Nordmark) writes:
>In article <8008@pur-ee.UUCP> youngb@pur-ee.UUCP (H. Bret Young) writes:
>>I do a
>>    copy C_Disk#1:c to ram:c
>>This don't work either (i.e. no error mesg and no copying being done).
>>But if I do
>>    copy df0:c to ram:c
>>then everything works fine.
>>
>>So, it seems to me that the problem is that the arp copy command does
>>not recognize disk volume names (I haven't checked if it has the same
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>NO! NO! NO!!!!
>The problem is that you use '#' in the volume name. ARP recognize this
>as some kind of wild card and gets screwed up.
>This is indeed a bug, but a minor one in my opinion.
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Besides,
>Making something *completely* compatible with AmigaDOS is a job that
>I don't even wish my worst enemys to do. :-)

	In the ARP documentation, "Why ARP?" it is stated that beyond
    compatibility with amigaDos, one of the purposes of Arp was that the
    commands all have a standard template.  Some of the original commands
    accepted wild cards, and some didn't.  Some of them accepted multiple
    filenames, and some didn't.  In ARP all of the commands accept
    wildcards and multiple filenames.  # is a valid wildcard in both
    AmigaDos and in ARP ( for compatibility ) meaning "match any number of
    occurences of the previous character."  hence when it encounters
    "CDisk#1:" the wild card expansion becomes "CDisk{any number of k's}1:"
    
	This internal consistancy was one of the motivations behind ARP and
    rests in the fact that the ARP commands all use Arp.library for such
    things as wildcard expansion.  To say that ARP's treatment of wildcards
    in a consistant manner is a bug is rediculous.  Special characters were
    not meant to be used in filenames for that would belie their use as
    wildcards.  If you insist on using special characters such as # * ? in
    your file names than you must tell ARP to ignore then by quoting the
    name, ie "CDisk#1:" instead of CDisk#1:.

	This is not a bug with ARP, it is operator error.

--
"You can't spend your history!"		Nic Bernstein
	Melinda Briggerty		Discovery World Museum
"... but you can sell it!"		818 W. Wisconsin av.
	Me				Milwaukee, WI 53233
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