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From: "Hyman Rosen" <hyman.rosen@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards
Date: 23 Feb 2007 11:04:17 -0800
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On Feb 22, 8:15 pm, Robert A Duff <bobd...@shell01.TheWorld.com>
wrote:
> Yuck -- bad design!

The designers of UNIX didn't feel that it was necessary for every
program to incorporate a wildcard expander when that could be done
externally. Back then keeping programs small and simple was a virtue.

> And there's no wildcard that means "all subdirectories, recursively".

And no wildcard that means "all files that have changed since
yesterday".

There are an infinite number of things that you might want to specify.
Many of them won't have been thought of when the programs which could
benefit from them are written. That's why it's better to do these
things
externally, and just have one program to modify when you come up with
your new wildcards.

> So we're stuck with kludgery like "find" and "xargs".  Yuck.

I don't understand. Doesn't "find" have exactly the interface that you
claim to want?

> And I can't create a command that works like this:
>     search *.ada "some string"

Huh? Why in the world not? The program knows how many arguments it
has,
and it can get to the last one as easily as the first!