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From: roger@celtics.UUCP (Roger B.A. Klorese)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: more rm insanity
Message-ID: <1895@celtics.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Dec-87 12:18:32 EST
Article-I.D.: celtics.1895
Posted: Thu Dec  3 12:18:32 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Dec-87 06:22:56 EST
References: <1257@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <6840002@hpcllmv.HP.COM> <9555@mimsy.UUCP> <6774@brl-smoke.ARPA> <337@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: roger@celtics.UUCP (Roger B.A. Klorese)
Organization: CELERITY (Northeast Area), Framingham, MA
Lines: 32

In article <337@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
|In article <1890@celtics.UUCP> roger@celtics.UUCP (Roger B.A. Klorese) writes:
|> >Because, unless one knows and fully understands that globbing is done by
|> >the shell and not the program, one would expect, as with other operating
|> >systems...
|> 
|In article <6774@brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
|> In fact that is a key "win" of UNIX over OSes that make applications deal
|> with globbing.
|
|Have you ever used TOPS-10?  That was a system where globbing was done by
|the program, not the shell.  Result?  No two programs had exactly the
|same syntax for file names (some would let you quote strange characters
|by writing octal, some wouldn't, some allowed directories, some didn't,
|&c &c).  And of course user-programs and commands HAD to use different
|syntax...  Doug Gwyn is absolutely right:  doing file-name expansion in
|the shell so that EVERY command does it EXACTLY the same way is wonderful.

Have *you* ever used Multics or PRIMOS?  The decision of which types of
pattern matches are expanded by the command interpreter and which by the
program can be set in the linking process.

My point, really, is that we need some way of determining in a command
line which patterns are *filenames* - these should be expanded by the
shell - and which are *(option patterns, network-node wildcards, etc.)* -
things which cannot be expanded or pattern-matched against a directory,
and should be passed to the program for expansion.
-- 
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