On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Brian Knittel <brian at quarterbyte.com>wrote:
For the "very poorly" category, I'd like
to nominate the DOS & Windows
command line globbing semantics, where ? matches one character OR
NOTHING. Likewise, ?? matches zero, one or two characters. And ???
matches zero, one, two or three characters.
So,
del *.?
will not delete just "file.a", it will delete "file" as well.
This sort of sets the gold standard for poor behavior.
Even Microsoft is at odds with itself about what ? means. In the
Windows world, the command shell doesn't expand wildcards. Applications
have to do it for themselves. The Visual Studio C runtime library
globbing routine incorrectly states that '?' matches "exactly one
char". So even some of their own developers aren't aware of this.
Brian
In UNIX the shell instead of the application expands *. That has all sort
of fun
effects... like you can type rm * .foo instead of rm *.foo
Fun fun fun... been there, done that.
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