10 Jul
2017
10 Jul
'17
9:27 a.m.
On 2017-07-09 23:44, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 2:29 PM Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> I vaguely remember something like "PIP *.TXT *.OLD" to rename files (the
> "*" was interpreted by the command itself, not the interpreter).
Well, that would not rename files, but copy them and at the same time
changing their names. But you could also do renaming in a similar way,
but usually it would require a switch to PIP telling it that you wanted
the files renamed, and not copied.
Also, the syntax of PIP, and the order of arguments is a bit different.
At least the versions I can remember right now, it would be:
PIP *.OLD=*.TXT
to copy, and
PIP *.OLD/RE=*.TXT
to rename.
And yes, it is the program who process the wildcard expansions, and not
the command interpreter. Which is why commands like the ones above
worked. This is one of those classical examples you get to when
comparing Unix with DEC OSes about wildcarding, and the effects the
different ways they are done have on the result.
(In Unix, you can't do such a mass copy and rename in the same way.)
All the DEC-10 and 11 operating systems I used had
that wildcard, as well
as IIRC even the PDP-8, maybe someone can confirm the -8.
Yes. It's the same on the OSes I've used on PDP-8s as well.
I would say that the globbing in Unix have much less to do with regular
expressions and much more to do with trying to mimic what DEC was doing
in their OSes.
It would have been nice had RE's been the
standard way to glob files, but,
that said, when I mention .*\.c to people instead of *.c they don't much
like it.
In a way, it would have made more sense to just use standard RE's for
globbing, but that didn't happen. And like I said, I suspect it was
because DEC OSes did it this way, and Unix just mimicked it. Same I
guess with the convention of '.' to separate filename from type. Even
though it's less pervasive in Unix than in DEC systems.
Johnny
--
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|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
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