15 Dec
2011
15 Dec
'11
5:21 p.m.
On 15/12/11 9:16 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
On Dec 14, 2011 1:47 AM, "Toby
Thain"<toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
Easy. You can make the program behave how you like regarding extensions, but it
will still run on Unix.
Well, /strictly/, yes, but since I have
never seen or heard of a single
UNIX or Linux shell that does what I consider to be the sane or right
thing, I think it's fair to say that it's an attribute of the OS as a whole.
I said this was a shell problem, but it's not necessarily even that
(assuming we are STILL talking about that rename example).
It's really an issue at the level of the rename *program* (not 'mv'
which has different semantics - as the example underlines) and a good
solution was hinted at by you:
$ ren @.log @.old
Where @ is a globbing operator that has the desired 'zip' semantics (not
*'s semantics, as we have so laboriously hammered to death). Such a
'ren' could be a 1-line Perl script...
But in any ahem Unix system, you can already do, ad hoc:
$ ls | perl -n -e 'chomp; m/(.*)\.log$/ && rename($_,
"$1.old");'
Use 'find' to do it recursively, of course (try doing *that* in DOS).
Insisting it's a "Unix" problem is like saying mammals have prickly
feathers.
--T
On 13/12/11 12:13 AM, Sean Conner wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Toby
Thain once stated:
> >> On 12/12/11 3:53 PM, Sean
Conner wrote:
>> >>> It was thus said that
the Great Toby Thain once stated:
>>> >>>> The
representation that Unix uses is effective for these use cases.
Can
>> you give an actual example of where Unix
handles extensions "very
>> poorly"? (Your faux-DOS command doesn't seem to qualify, as it is
>> neither about Unix (rather, shell), nor a valid use of mv.)
> Well, it depends upon your definition of "Unix". There are
certain
> commands I've come across that handles extentions poorly. Like gunzip:
> And GCC also has trouble with
extentions:
Errr... again, these are *programs*, not
Unix...
Again, what is *your* definition of Unix? The Unix *kernel* only cares
It's not necessary to change the operating system to fix this. But
perhaps
Liam misspoke in the heat of the moment, and meant "*shell* handles
file extensions very poorly". I haven't seen a correction in this vein yet,
so this is only a theory.