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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:15:31 -0500
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Date: 2007-02-22T20:15:31-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Jean-Pierre Rosen <rosen@adalog.fr> writes:

> Too bad that Unix behaviour was wrong in the first place...

I agree with JP Rosen, here.  The way wildcards work in Unix is
completely broken.  (Not that I'm advocating Windows instead!)

I type:

    grep -i blah *.ad?

and I get:

    Arguments too long.

Yuck -- bad design!

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

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

If I meant to type:

    mv some_dir/*.ada .

But I forgot the ".", so I accidentally typed:

    mv some_dir/*.ada

I get an error message (OK).  Except in the case where there happen to
be exactly two files ending in .ada in that directory -- then the
command destroys one of them!  Yuck.

And I can't create a command that works like this:

    search *.ada "some string"

That's why the arguments of "grep" are backwards (search-string first,
then the file names -- I've gotten so used to it that I hardly remember
that it is indeed backwards).  Yuck.

If I type:

    rm *.junk blah.*

and there happens to be a file called blah.junk, I get an annoying error
message.  Why?  I asked to delete that file!

The problem is not so much that the shell does the wildcard expansions.
The problem is that it's all based on textual substition.  Semantics
based on textual substition is just plain confusing.  What looks like
one argument (e.g. *.ada) ought to be in fact one argument (albeit a
list of many files).

- Bob