Globbing

[Rahul Dhesi]

In <DmNmy1w164w at mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us> mju at mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc
Unangst) writes:

>If you need to be convinced that taking globbing out of the shell is a
>Bad Thing, just look at MS-DOS.  MS-DOS has never done wildcard
>globbing for you, and as a result, you have about sixteen thousand
>different wildcard expansion schemes out there.

Actually the whole truth is that (a) MS-DOS provides a somewhat flaky
system call that does do globbing for you, but that (b) it is rather
inconvenient to use this system call, and it has bugs to preserve
compatibility with CP/M, whose corresponding system call also had
bugs.

So the reason that programmers invent their own globbing schemes under
MS-DOS is not because the MS-DOS shell doesn't do it, but because the
system call provided does it so badly.  If the system call did a better
job, programmers would use it, because it would be more convenient than
rolling their own.
--
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi%cirrusl at oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com>
UUCP:  oliveb!cirrusl!dhesi