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From: "Adam Beneschan" <adam@irvine.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards
Date: 23 Feb 2007 08:58:11 -0800
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Date: 2007-02-23T08:58:11-08:00
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On Feb 22, 5:15 pm, Robert A Duff <bobd...@shell01.TheWorld.com>
wrote:
> Jean-Pierre Rosen <r...@adalog.fr> writes:
> > Too bad that Unix behaviour was wrong in the first place...
>
> I agree with JP Rosen, here.  The way wildcards work in Unix is
> completely broken.  (Not that I'm advocating Windows instead!)
>
> I type:
>
>     grep -i blah *.ad?
>
> and I get:
>
>     Arguments too long.
>
> Yuck -- bad design!

This problem has a simple solution, though...  Increase the size of
the shell buffer used to hold the expansion!!

Well, that's how they keep solving it.  I still keep breaking it,
partly because I try to do really silly things like grep'ing tens of
thousands of old mail messages for somebody's name.  So I guess the
Unix/Linux/***x authors need to go back to their drawing boards and
figure out how to tack another zero onto the size of the buffer
allocation.

It would have made so much sense to have grep call an OS function to
retrieve the file names one at a time and search them all, and then no
huge buffer would be needed to hold all the filenames.

                         -- Adam