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From: Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 10:25:08 +0100
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Date: 2007-02-23T10:25:08+01:00
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Robert A Duff wrote:

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

Not in POSIX, but at least one of the newer shells (Zsh) has it: **/*.ad[sb]

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

And the untyped-ness of pipes.

> And I can't create a command that works like this:
>
>     search *.ada "some string"

Why not?

> 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!

I consider that a bug in "rm".  But it would be slightly less
efficient to make "rm" keep track of which files it already has
unlinked.

> 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).

I think you may be right about this.  But who feels like creating a
better shell?  Preferably also with typed pipes.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"I just might be wrong."