To: djgpp Subject: Re: Last word (for now) on globbing Date: Mon, 30 Mar 92 22:19:43 PST From: Jonathan Ryshpan Status: O >>Just a note: I added globbing to go32 1.06 over the weekend. It's >>primitive, but it works. > The simplest example of a program which fails if the shell >does globbing is something like WHEREIS which searches an entire disk >for a file matching a wildcard. If the shell expands the wildcard, you >get an error if it doesn't match something in the current directory, or >if something does match, then WHEREIS doesn't see the wildcard. The equivalent of WHEREIS under Unix is, of course, find. You have to quote or escape the -name argument, if it contains a wild card. This is about the only case that I've been annoyed by the expansion of wild cards by the shell in Unix. It's a small price to pay for a completely uniform globbing mechanism that lets you type "more inv*1997" for "more inventory-for-june-1997", etc. It's easier to remember the shell's globbing rules than which programs glob and which don't.