Re: Shell hate (was Re: unzip hate)

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From: Martin Ebourne
Subject: Re: Shell hate (was Re: unzip hate)
Date: 17:30 on 20 Feb 2007
Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> 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=3D" 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.
There's stuff above here

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