17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
2:36 p.m.
Well, that and the fact that getting "rm"
(or del) to behave the way
I suggest actually requires low-level changes to the shell's wildcard
expansion
Yes.
(*and* thus would require a change to all all tools)
No.
There is no reason this couldn't be done by expanding wildcards as
normal, but providing some way - which doesn't affect tools that don't
choose to call it - for a program to get hold of its pre-globbing
arglist, if its execer provided one.
Then rm could use the new facility to see if any args were "*", or if
there was only one arg and it's "*", or whatever. Programs that don't
know about the new way or don't want to muck with it continue to work
the way they always have. Of course it would need to be designed
carefully so that execers that don't know about it don't break programs
that try to use it, but that's doable.
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