Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Aug 20, 12:49 am, Jacob Sparre Andersen <spa...@nbi.dk> wrote:

> > Of course, it's all ridiculous: hiding file names that start with
> > "." is a stupid idea.  Expanding wildcards on the command line and
> > then passing separate args as strings is a stupid idea.  This is one
> > of the (few) areas where Windows does it right, compared to Unix.
> > Sigh.
>
> Expanding wildcards on the command line centralises that feature, so
> the users don't have to worry about how the individual applications
> have decided to implement wildcard expansion.  I would definitely not
> be happy with a system, where each and every program had a slightly
> different interpretation of a wildcard.

That wouldn't need to be the case.  On VMS, for example, wildcards are
passed to the program and not expanded by the command-line
interpreter.  But VMS also provides standard services that take a
wildcard and return the matching file names, one at a time.
Presumably every program that needs to expand wildcards would use
these routines, rather than reinvent the wheel.  So they would be
consistent.

Furthermore, suppose you wrote an interactive program that takes its
own commands, some of which may refer to wildcarded file names.  How
would the shell's expansion of wildcards help make things consistent
in that case?  Wouldn't it be more centralized to have an OS or
standard library routine to do the expansion, that would work the same
on both the wildcards you specify when running the program, and the
wildcards you specify in the program's own interactive command line
(or in a text box in a GUI, or whatever)?

I don't see any advantage to doing it the way Unix did it.  Besides
the above disadvantages, you can't write a Unix command that does
something like

   rename *.ada *.adb

as is available on other OS's.  (All right, you could, but you'd have
to require quote marks around the wildcards.)


> Given how anarchistic most "unix programmers" are, this is definitely
> a more user friendly solution.

User-friendly, until you have a user that has a large number of files,
and then can't do an operation on all of them because the shell that
expands the wildcards on the command line finds that it can't fit all
the file names in its command-line buffer.  I've been there FAR too
many times.  I don't consider this to be a friendly feature.

                                        -- Adam