Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards

[Martin Krischik <krischik@users.sourceforge.net>]

Markus E Leypold wrote:

> 
> Martin Krischik <krischik@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
> 
>> here. And they got it wrong. Bot Dos and VMS will warn you on:
>             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Well, Martin, since you're so sure about that: On which criteria did
> "they get it wrong"? Where are the specs against which the predicate
> "right" can be tested?

Georg Does

rm -rf /tmp/*

work? Allways? What happen when the sum of all fileneames exceed 48kb -
which is the current limit for commandlines. On the other hand 

DELETE /noConfirm sys$scratch:[...]*.*;*

on VMS or 

DEL /SEXY %TEMP%\*.*

using 4NT on Windows will work fine no matter how many files are in the temp
directory. Just make sure that  sys$scratch: is not your home directory!

Neither the Dos/Windows etc nor the VMS Shell expand wildcard. Expanding
wildcard is done by a library under control of the program called. This is
why

$ SEARCH MY_TEXT.DAT *.*

works so well. Or a better example would be:

$ SEARCH *.TXT *HELLO*

SEARCH knows that the first parameter is filename and should be expanded and
the 2nd is a search pattern and does not. The program know more about the
parameters then the shell and therefore the shell expansion in unix might
be convenient at first but does not scale all that well when thinks become
more compicated.

Martin
-- 
mailto://krischik@users.sourceforge.net
Ada programming at: http://ada.krischik.com