recursive grep

Scott Schwartz schwartz at psuvax1.cs.psu.edu
Sun Oct 1 12:00:14 AEST 1989


In article <9408 at chinet.chi.il.us> Leslie Mikesell writes:

| Well, how would you go about parsing filenames out of a list if you
| can't use spaces or newlines as the delimiters?

Good point.  Wouldn't it be nice if programs that spit out filenames
also (optionally?) spit out the terminating \0?  Then you'd have the
correct delimiter at your disposal.  

| Personally, I think it is a mistake to allow control characters or
| shell metacharacters to be in filenames. 

Define control character, shell, and metacharacter.  :-)

| We've been through this before and I doubt that anyone has changed
| their mind, but I'll bet no one wants to have a file named ";rm *"
| in their directories waiting for a shell script to eval it or a
| program to insert it into a system() call.

Maybe noninteractive shells should turn off globbing, as a safety
feature?  

System() can certainly be tricky to get right.  In a philisophical
kind way it has the same problem as gets() :-)



--
Scott Schwartz		<schwartz at shire.cs.psu.edu>
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming....



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