Re: A simple hate today.

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From: Martin Ebourne
Subject: Re: A simple hate today.
Date: 19:08 on 25 May 2006
Philip Newton <philip.newton@xxxxx.xxx> wrote:
> On 5/25/06, Martin Ebourne <lists@xxxxxxx.xx.xx> 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
%

There are things to hate about zsh for sure, but I've yet to try a =20
shell which has a shorter list of things to hate.

? is a pattern character as you know. And I have zsh to abort a =20
command if I enter a pattern that doesn't match anything. This is a =20
good thing, because if I entered a pattern I sure expect it to match, =20
so if it fails I don't want the command to run because it'll probably =20
only go off and do something stupid.

As you say, if you have any file with a 2 character name starting with =20
a hyphen then all of a sudden -? doesn't work as a help option any =20
more, in any shell. That isn't hateful, it's downright vile.

Options should be letters, not symbols.

Cheers,

Martin.
There's stuff above here

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