On Thu, 25 May 2006 19:08:17 +0100, Martin Ebourne <li...@ebourne.me.uk> wrote:
> Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 5/25/06, Martin Ebourne <li...@ebourne.me.uk> wrote: > >> -? is nasty. Not only does it look ugly but it's not even a letter. > > > > You have to escape it from your shell? Either you have files whose > > name is simply hyphen plus another character in the current directory, > > or you have a hateful shell. > > % diff -? > zsh: no match > % (tcsh) % diff -? diff: invalid option -- ? diff: Try `diff --help' for more information. Exit 2 Bach to the original hate. HERE I would agree with Sabrina. Djeez, I'm asking for help, just give it. > There are things to hate about zsh for sure, but I've yet to try a > shell which has a shorter list of things to hate. > > ? is a pattern character as you know. And I have zsh to abort a > command if I enter a pattern that doesn't match anything. This is a > good thing, because if I entered a pattern I sure expect it to match, > so if it fails I don't want the command to run because it'll probably > only go off and do something stupid. > > As you say, if you have any file with a 2 character name starting with > a hyphen then all of a sudden -? doesn't work as a help option any > more, in any shell. That isn't hateful, it's downright vile. > > Options should be letters, not symbols. Nah, we should allow unicode too. And I stick to my opinion that -? is asking for help. That's how I grew up in Unix land. -- H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://amsterdam.pm.org/) using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.9.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11, & 11.23, SuSE 10.0, AIX 4.3 & 5.2, and Cygwin. http://qa.perl.org http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/