Date: Thu, 1992 Apr 2   13:42 EST
From: Bob Babcock   <PEPRBV AT CFAAMP DOT BITNET>
To: djgpp   <djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu>
Subject: Re: Last word (for now) on globbing
Status: O

>>Can this be disabled?  I've always thought that globbing by the shell
>>is a mistake.  The program should get first crack at the command line,
>>and the shell should provide a convenient method of globbing only if it
>>is desired.
>Can't you just quote the regex so the shell doesn't do globbing??  And
>I don't belive that globbing by the shell is a mistake it reduces code
>size and makes applications simpler to write.

Quoting is always awkward, and it gets worse when you use more than one
operating system.  Square brackets have no special meaning to MS-DOS,
but do to Unix, and a backslash may be a directory separator.  My
comment that the shell should provide a convenient method of globbing
was meant to address the code size and complexity question.  If a
program could just say
    glob_command_line();
and that got translated into a simple operating system call, then
globbing would be trivial to add to any program which needed it.  This
list is not the right place to talk about how operating systems should
be designed, so I will probably not post again on this topic.