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From: duncant@mbunix.mitre.org (Thomson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Wildcards
Message-ID: <102618@linus.UUCP>
Date: 15 Mar 90 00:05:40 GMT
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
Lines: 33

In article peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

...good ideas about wildcards omitted...
>
>Scripts would probably run with quotewild on by default, and the more powerful
>amiga-style wildcards, and interactive shells would turn quotewild off and use
>the terser unix-style wildcards.

|I am surprised at the use of the phrase "more powerful amiga-style wildcards".
More powerful than what?  Everything you can do with # and ? you can doo
with * and ?, not jsut on unix, but also on VMS and (to some extent) on DOS.
Note that VMS also allows a "wildcard" mechanism in path sepcifications, not
just file names, so you can do much more flexible searches of directory trees
for example.

I never understood where the AmigaDos wildcard conventions came from.  Why 
deviate from a widely used convention in favor of a new one which noone is familiar with?

Personnally, I hope that the Amiga "#?" strangeness fades away with 1.4 and
later releases.

Last, I have written a short routine name_match( pattern, string) which tests 
whether the string matches a pattern, which may contain arbitrary * and ?
wild cards.  I also use in my own programs a convention that "..."  in a
path means "this directory and any subdirectories leading off it".  This
would be handy to have as a standard Amiga convention, so that I could do 
   COPY vol:dir/dir.../*foo?ar.* destination
instead of ....  how Would you do this under DOS?

Duncan Thomson

--
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