Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

"Hyman Rosen" <hyman.rosen@gmail.com> writes:

> On Feb 22, 8:15 pm, Robert A Duff <bobd...@shell01.TheWorld.com>
> wrote:
>> Yuck -- bad design!
>
> The designers of UNIX didn't feel that it was necessary for every
> program to incorporate a wildcard expander when that could be done
> externally. Back then keeping programs small and simple was a virtue.

The way they did it simply doesn't work.  I shouldn't have to use a
different method (e.g. xargs) to pass a lot of file names to a command
than to pass a small number.  It's not that hard to design it so it
works for any number of files, no matter how big disk drives get in the
future.  And still keep things small and simple.

And xargs doesn't work, either.  It works for 'grep', but doesn't work
for 'wc'.  So much for the alleged simplicity of doing everything in
the shell.

> I don't understand. Doesn't "find" have exactly the interface that you
> claim to want?

Certainly not.  I use find all the time, and I hate it.

>> And I can't create a command that works like this:
>>     search *.ada "some string"
>
> Huh? Why in the world not? The program knows how many arguments it
> has,
> and it can get to the last one as easily as the first!

Yeah, I guess you're right about that.  Sorry.

- Bob