Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!oliveb!amiga!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: AmigaDos vs Unix wildcards/pathnames
Message-ID: <6254@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 14 Mar 89 18:15:42 GMT
References: <10260015@eecs.nwu.edu>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 46

in article <10260015@eecs.nwu.edu>, gore@eecs.nwu.edu (Jacob Gore) says:

> / comp.sys.amiga / daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) / Mar 13, 1989 /
>>And how would you succinctly state:
>>	Delete #?(.cp|.h|%) 
>>in UNIX-ese?
> 	rm *{.cp,.h,%}

In AmigaDOS, "%" matches the NULL character.  Which, of course, made the
above example reduce to "Delete #?", which wasn't what I had intended.  I
figured you could do it in UNIX pretty closely, which is exactly my point.
Try it in VMS or MS-DOS....

>> > 1> copy (*.c|*.h) t:    (what's wrong with `cp *.c *.h t:' ??)

>> That's a detail of the AmigaDOS copy program, not the wild card system.

> Interesting that you should mention that.  In Unix, it would be a detail of
> the shell, not the program.

Not really.  In UNIX, _pattern matching_ is done by the shell, true.  But it
is still up to a program to decide how the expanded parameters passed by
the shell will be interpreted.  Some Amiga shells also expand patterns for
the command, but if that commands isn't written to handle more than one file,
you're SOL.  UNIX "cp" must have to knowledge to copy files argv[1] through
argv[argc-2] to directory argv[argc-1].  AmigaDOS "Copy" doesn't do this,
and that's the main difference here.

> Unix commands do not have consistent option specifications, but they ARE
> consistent, as the user sees them, when it comes to wildcards.  This, of
> course, is because most of them don't deal with wildcards at all, because
> they know the shell is there to do it for them.

That part is true.  As long as wild card expansion is available as a 
standard library call, it's not much matter who does the expansion; there
are minor advantages to both methods, and you can always choose the shell
that suits you.  On the Amiga, it makes as much sense to have consistent
pattern matching in file requesters and other similar places.  We need this
function as a standard library call.

> Jacob Gore				Gore@EECS.NWU.Edu
> Northwestern Univ., EECS Dept.		{oddjob,gargoyle,att}!nucsrl!gore
-- 
Dave Haynie  "The 32 Bit Guy"     Commodore-Amiga  "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: D-DAVE H     BIX: hazy
              Amiga -- It's not just a job, it's an obsession