Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
How many of the people who think shell wildcard expansion is hateful
have spent much time using other people's programs on any OS where
the command line is the normal user interface and where wildcard
expansion is up to the application writers?
God it's hateful.
"Oh yeh, that program only does wildcards on the first argument and
on the "file=" parameter if you didn't specify a device name."
"Oh, sorry, yeh, it doesn't let you wildcard the type. What? It does
WHAT? Geeze, why would anyone expect that to work?"
"No, that one's a port of a VMS program, and it only does VMS style
wildcards."
"Oh, yeh, you need to quote the filename to get normal wildcards."
"No, don't quote that, it'll try and treat the quotes as part of the
file name."
"Single quotes only."
"Don't quote it, replace the spaces with underscores."
"Wildcards on the second file name only work if the first file name
has wildcards in it."
"Oh, yeh, you need to use UNIX wildcards on all of his programs."
"That's not a wildcard, star means 'any host'."
"The wildcards are '#' and '%', something to do with the database."
"Question mark means the file type is optional."
"No, you have to leave the quote off at the end of the line or it
won't match anything. Yes, I know they're unbalanced. If you ask me,
so was he."
"Two stars in a row means a literal star."
More! More! Go on, more pain! Harder!
Ahem
Martin.
