Re: [TUHS] Origins of globbing

Noel: Thanks for the heads-up on glob. It didn't occur to me to look in manual section 8. On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 7:11 PM George Michaelson &lt;ggm(a)algebras.org&gt; wrote: globbing was the application of specific syntax markers to concepts, Certainly. But I think the specific meanings of "*" to mean "any number of any characters" and "?" to mean "any character" do not go back further than 1964. Multics had support for * and ?, but I don't know when that was added or if it was there from the beginning. Multics filenames, unlike DEC ones, allow multiple dots, which are treated specially by these characters: neither ? nor * can match a dot, but ** can. So perhaps they got into Unix from Multics after all. Stratus VOS is another direct descendant of Multics, but I don't know if it has globs. Windows avoids quotation by blocking any of < > " : | ? * from appearing in pathnames (/ and \ mean the same thing to the kernel, but not to the shell or to the GUI file picker). In addition, non-disk device names cannot appear as part of a filename either before or after the dot: nul.c and c.nul, for example, are illegal because nul: is a device name, and you can use \dev\nul to reference the null device even though \dev does not exist. I think set noglob; <do things>; set glob is often under-appreciated. I found the absence of set nullglob (which causes *.foo to expand to nothing if it matches no files) on Solaris 8 very irritating. It's still not part of Posix sh, though bash has it. I wrote some wrappers around cp and mv that looked for * and ? in the arguments (indicating no files) and removed those arguments; if no arguments were left after that, they exited with 0. Thus "safecp *.bak ../backup" would silently succeed if there were no .bak files. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led. And through the air. I am he that walks unseen. I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number. --Bilbo