CompuServe Messages

As a big unix fan, there was a time I would have agreed with you, but the truth is there are a lot of advantages to *not* having wildcard expansion done in the shell. One of the biggest advantages is in the case of rm *, unix systems will happily delete all the files in the current directory with that one, while a command that performs its own wildcard expansion can ask you if you really want to do that. As far as the rest goes, with a decent shared library pattern matching routine, most of the objections go away, program logic is still very simple, and hardly larger if at all then the case for just groveling through the commands. Martin and charlie really did an outstanding job on the arp wildcard functions, you should check them out, I wish I had them on unix… sdb