Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ulowell!cbmvax!ditto
From: ditto@cbmvax.UUCP (Michael "Ford" Ditto)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: arp CD command change???
Summary: Unix wildcards are still better
Message-ID: <6001@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 18 Feb 89 03:10:47 GMT
References: <8902131846.AA21527@postgres.Berkeley.EDU> <35960@bbn.COM> <DEVEN.89Feb14055924@daniel.pawl.rpi.edu> <3439@sugar.uu.net>
Reply-To: ditto@cbmvax.UUCP (Michael "Ford" Ditto)
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 64

In article <3439@sugar.uu.net> peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <DEVEN.89Feb14055924@daniel.pawl.rpi.edu>, deven@pawl.rpi.edu (Deven Corzine) writes:
 [ says Unix wild cards are just as good as AmigaDos's ]
>Not so. You can't, in UNIX wildcards, specify "all .o or .s files starting
>with "uk", "can", or "us", and an optional ".z".

Yes, you can, and this is an example of the flexibility of expanding
wildcards in the shell and passing them to programs as separate args:

	uk*.[os] can*.[os] us*.[os] uk*.[os].z can*.[os].z us*.[os].z

>On the Amiga you can specify:
>
>	(uk|can|us)#?.(o|s)(|.z)

In this example, the Amiga syntax is certainly more consice and easier
to understand, but there are examples that go the other way as well.
For example, suppose you want to specify just the files foo, bar, and
baz.  In bourne shell syntax it's

	foo bar baz

but in AmigaDos syntax you have to type

	foo|bar|baz

which results in an undesired directory search, and many AmigaDos
programs won't let you extend the above extension arbitrarily.  I
remember one time I was trying to copy several particular files from
sys:c to ram:c and the AmigaDos copy command would only copy the
first five matching files when I used the above syntax.  I had to
use multiple copy commands to get it done.  This was partially
because of a bug in that particular command's wildcard expander
(which has been fixed, I beleive), but was compounded by the fact
that most AmigaDos programs will only accept ONE single (possibly
wildcard) argument as their file list.

Here are some examples of things that just CAN'T be done with
AmigaDos wildcards:

	dir1/foo dir2/bar dir3/baz
	dir1/foo dir2/foo dir3/foo
	dir[123]/foo
	*/foo
	(and similar constructs using device/assign names rather
	 than directories.)

>> In addition, the wildcards are expanded in the shell, [ ... ]
>This is nice, but an orthogonal issue.

I disagree, it is a closely related issue, and certainly a more
significant one.  AmigaDos wildcard syntax is more general than that
of Unix shells, but because it can only be used in more limited ways,
it is less useful.  AmigaDos wildcard "features" can be emulated on
Unix, but not vice-versa.  And on Unix it would take 5 minutes to
modify the shell to use AmigaDos wildcard syntax and everything would
work.  Each user can choose a shell that uses the preferred syntax.
-- 
					-=] Ford [=-

"The number of Unix installations	(In Real Life:  Mike Ditto)
has grown to 10, with more expected."	ford@kenobi.cts.com
- The Unix Programmer's Manual,		...!sdcsvax!crash!kenobi!ford
  2nd Edition, June, 1972.		ditto@cbmvax.commodore.com