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