Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!uhnix1!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: AmigaDos vs Unix wildcards/pathnames
Message-ID: <3662@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 22 Mar 89 12:09:23 GMT
References: <352@sagpd1.UUCP> <6294@cbmvax.UUCP> <11242@ut-emx.UUCP> <GARYO.89Mar21143919@prometheus.think.com>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 23

A reason for putting wildcards in the shell that hasn't been brought up yet:

If you do the wildcard expansion in the program, then there's really no way
to predict just how another program is going to do it. Under UNIX, I know that
if I 'execl("/usr/local/random_program", "random", filename, 0);' then that
program will correctly interpret the filename as a filename. It won't barf
because it's got spaces in it, or because it's got a '*' in it (or a '#', for
that matter), and so on.

Even if I use "system" to run the program, I know that I can quote any funky
characters in the filename with quotes or backslashes and it'll work. If I
pass a quoted string to a random program on the Amiga (or MS-DOS, or any other
system where the expansion is done by the program) I never know what it'll do.

Speaking of quoting, how many of you are aware that '*' is the 'literal-next'
character in AmigaDOS? It's not surprising, since that's how it works in BCPL,
and it's documented... but how many folks out there honor it?

Why would you need it? What if you have a file with any one of '#?"' in it? How
do you quote that?
-- 
Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva      `-_-'
...texbell!sugar!peter, or peter@sugar.hackercorp.com  'U`