Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

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

"Robert A Duff" <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote in message 
news:wccljlei82j.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com...
...
> Sigh.  No language/OS design can prevent incompetent programmers from
> making a mess.  To me, it seems sufficient to have a (standard!) service
> that says "Apply so-and-so procedure to each file (or file name) that
> matches such-and-such wildcard."  I don't know why it worked well on
> VMS, but not on MS-DOS.

It didn't work in MS-DOS because the original MS-DOS facility only supported 
the '?' wildcard; processing of '*' had to be done by the operation - 
expanding to the correct number of '?' to fill an 8.3 name. (That was 
inherited from CP/M.) By the time that a proper facility was available, 
everyone had written there own, slightly different versions.

Win32 never had this problem, however, the search facility there always 
properly (modulo bugs) supported wildcards. But I think a lot of those old 
cobbled solutions came over initially -- although they're probably gone by 
now.

End of history lesson. :-)

                                Randy.