Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!rtech!cpsc6a!cpsc6b!crs
From: crs@cpsc6b.cpsc6a.att.com (Chris (Life is hard, and then you die) Seaman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: ARP1.3 bug
Summary: This is not a bug (I think)...
Message-ID: <509@cpsc6b.cpsc6a.att.com>
Date: 20 Apr 89 18:14:32 GMT
References: <8589@polya.Stanford.EDU> <6585@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T (CPSC), Oakland, CA
Lines: 37

In article <6585@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>, wolff@cs.purdue.EDU (Robert M. Wolff) writes:
< From article <8589@polya.Stanford.EDU>, by gilham@polya.Stanford.EDU (Fred Gilham):
< > I don't know whether to call this a bug, or my stupidity, or just
< > something to watch out for.  But with the arp 1.3 delete command, if
< > you type something like
< > 
< >    delete *~
< > 
< > you delete everything.  At least, I do.  I guess it matches "anything"
< > concatenated with "not nothing".

That's exactly what it is doing, which evaluates to "anything" :-).

< I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong) that you are trying to NOT delete
< something by the *~ notation.
< The docs for arp13 state that you need to use ~* to NOT delete something.
< 
< i.e. If you want to NOT delete *.c, you would 'delete ~*.c'...
< 
< Right? Now I'm not positive...I think this is right though.
< bob
< 

Bob is right on the money here.  Ths ARP overview manual tells us that
the "~" is a special character, and must be quoted via the tick "'"
character to escape its special meaning.  I think you will find that
modifying the original command to:

    delete *'~

will do what you expect it to.

-- 
Chris Seaman            |    o\  /o
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