12 Dec
2011
12 Dec
'11
2:33 p.m.
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