On 10 December 2011 17:29, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
On Dec 10, 2011, at 11:59 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
What is so tough is the way that the shell
expands them, not the
command. I am assured this is wonderfully useful for many people but
for me it's a complete PITA. For instance, I frequently need to do
things like:
REN *.log *.old
... which works fine on DOS, Windows and most other OSs but doesn't
work on Unix/Linux.
In general, because file extensions are a sort of grafted-on
afterthought on Unix, I find it handles them very poorly, whereas they
were and remain integral to DOS-based & Windows-based systems - i.e.
about 95% of the machines I support.
"Poorly" is in the eye of the beholder; I tend to assume that the wildcard is
just a literal substitution. ?Unix doesn't support a many-to-many reassignment for
"mv" (I suppose you could call that a deficit), so the wildcard wouldn't do
anything useful in any case.
Well, quite. In general, stuff that I actually want to do, which I did
routinely on CP/M and VMS and PC DOS/MS-DOS/DR-DOS and OS/2 and
$WINDOWS just doesn't work on *Nix, or worse still, it does something
weird which is generally disastrous.
Unix aficionadi generally at this point respond by telling me that [a]
I am clearly deeply retarded and [b] but that they can do
^ wibble !!!$<<ptang %%$&whoops_ _[[fling$42]] #{?~~} > kapow
which takes the all the logfiles of something I've never heard of in
over 2 decades in IT, finds the entries from the Thursday before the
last Easter which fell the week before a full moon, extracts all
French-speaking visitors with brown eyes, and builds a concordance of
the proper nouns they searched for in the sort order of early
Mongolian tomb script.
They then proclaim that this clearly makes shell far superior and
express bewilderment that I don't ever want to do this, but that I do
want to bulk-rename files, because that's clearly weird and obscure
and never happens.
My current
plan is to train as a TEFL teacher and spend a few years
roaming the world, learning new languages and living in exotic places.
After that, who ?knows?
Always sounded like a nice boat ticket to exotic places to me. ?It's either that or
the Navy, where you have to point guns at the exotic places, which wouldn't have sat
well with me.
Same here!
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile:
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