7 Oct
2020
7 Oct
'20
8:25 a.m.
On Tue, Oct 6, 2020, at 11:17, John Cowan wrote:
Globbing was uninterpreted by the shell-equivalent in
the DEC OSes, and
was understood only by a few programs, those responsible for listing
directories and copying, renaming, and deleting files. Universal
globbing in the shell was AFAIK original with Unix
it's worth mentioning that "universal" globbing comes with restrictions
that operating systems where programs interpret globs don't have: you can't
reliably pass a glob as an option argument, or as an argument which refers to files that
do not exist in the filesystem, without quoting it, which requires additional quoting when
you want a literal * or ? character. Quoting is also required even when the argument
position is not semantically a set of filenames at all.
Also, since you mentioned renaming, MS-DOS/Windows, at least, has a primitive 'rename
one glob to another' [it has rules that technically give meaning to any destination
glob, but it's most sensible when you want to change the filename extension of a set
of files] function that's not possible either on Unix [though utilities do exist to
perform various transformations on the name of a set of files to be renamed]
Although, sometimes the results can be surprising - the MS-DOS/Windows "copy"
command, for example, *concatenates* a globbed set of files [achievable with a list of
filenames by separating them with plus signs] rather than copying them separately into a
destination directory.