Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!psuvax1!psuvax1!schwartz
From: schwartz@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: recursive grep
Message-ID: 
Date: 1 Oct 89 02:00:14 GMT
References: <13710@polyslo.calpoly.edu> <144000002@cdp>
	<2390@auspex.auspex.com> <9408@chinet.chi.il.us>
Organization: Pennsylvania State University, computer science
Lines: 30
In-Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us's message of 29 Aug 89 20:10:10 GMT

In article <9408@chinet.chi.il.us> Leslie Mikesell writes:

| Well, how would you go about parsing filenames out of a list if you
| can't use spaces or newlines as the delimiters?

Good point.  Wouldn't it be nice if programs that spit out filenames
also (optionally?) spit out the terminating \0?  Then you'd have the
correct delimiter at your disposal.  

| Personally, I think it is a mistake to allow control characters or
| shell metacharacters to be in filenames. 

Define control character, shell, and metacharacter.  :-)

| We've been through this before and I doubt that anyone has changed
| their mind, but I'll bet no one wants to have a file named ";rm *"
| in their directories waiting for a shell script to eval it or a
| program to insert it into a system() call.

Maybe noninteractive shells should turn off globbing, as a safety
feature?  

System() can certainly be tricky to get right.  In a philisophical
kind way it has the same problem as gets() :-)



--
Scott Schwartz		
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming....