Globbing

[Marc Unangst]

fetter at cos.com (Bob Fetter) writes:
> different story.  Whether this is a 'good thing' in today's Unix world
> is yet another question.

If you need to be convinced that taking globbing out of the shell is a
Bad Thing, just look at MS-DOS.  MS-DOS has never done wildcard
globbing for you, and as a result, you have about sixteen thousand
different wildcard expansion schemes out there.  Some programs don't
even support wildcards.  Some do, but don't support things like
"*/file" (i.e., a wildcarded directory name).  Some make you type
"*.*" if you mean "all files", and some accept "*" for "all files".
(Programs of the former type usually take "*" to mean "all files
without an extension".)

But definitely the best are the programs that follow COMMAND.COM's
lead in expanding wildcards -- "*word*" is the same as "*", which
means if you type "del *foo*.bar", you will REALLY delete "*.bar".

It's a pain in the ass to remember which programs use which globbing
schemes.  And it can cause actual damage, if you can't remember what
globbing scheme a program uses and do something like the
aforementioned "del *foo*.bar".  I'd *much* prefer that the shell do
the globbing -- at least then, you have some sort of consistancy.

--
Marc Unangst               |
mju at mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us  | "Bus error: passengers dumped"
...!umich!leebai!mudos!mju |