Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"vlc" <just.another.spam.account@googlemail.com> wrote in message 
news:8a5f3b98-1c5a-4d47-aca7-e106d1223fa9@a26g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
...
>If the specifications are different, the utilities in Ada.Directories
>are quite unusable for UNIX/Linux.

I think you are seriously confused about how this stuff works in Unix. 
(Either that, or I'm getting senile... ;-)

> In case I want to process all *.c files in a given directory, I could code 
> something like
>
>with Ada.Directories; use Ada.Directories;
>
>procedure Parse is
>   procedure Do_It (Directory_Entry : Directory_Entry_Type) is
>   begin
>      -- Do something
>   end Do_It;
>begin
>   Ada.Directories.Search (".", "*.c", (others => True), Do_It'Access);
>end Parse;
>
>If I want to ensure me what files will be processed, I would call e.g.
>
>ls -A *.c
>
>first. But if there would be a file ".c" in the current directory, it
>would not be listed by the "ls" command, but processed by my program.

But "ls" does not display all of the files by default! You need an option (I 
don't recall which one; I used to always use "ls -al" but I no longer 
remember why) to see the files that start with a ".". That doesn't mean that 
they don't match the wildcard, it just means that "ls" doesn't display them.

If you did an "ls *.", that wouldn't display ".", either, but there still is 
a file with that name in the directory.

Ada.Directories.Search does "display" all filenames, of course, as there is 
no filter to match the goofy behavior of "ls". So you see this file that 
"ls" does not show.

My recollection (mostly from the CSH on Unix, SCO, and Sun OS, which 
admittedly is a long time ago) is that this is a feature of "ls" only. That 
is, if you write your own program "wobble" and then call it

    wobble *.c

you would in fact get the file ".c" in the list of files passed. After all, 
"*.c" is just a regular expression, and one that clearly matches the string 
".c" (since '*' means match 0 or more arbitrary characters).

If that's not true, then the implementation in question probably has a bug 
(it really ought to match what the shell does, although there can be no 
*requirement* of that). But I suspect the problem here is that you are 
confusing the partial list of files that "ls" displays by default with the 
meaning of wildcard file expressions.

                               Randy.

P.S. I recall that I programmed my csh to include a number of options on all 
calls to "ls" (and a number of the other predefined utilities) so that I 
didn't have to type them all the time. Which may be why I don't remember 
which ones they were...