On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 5:54 AM Tyler Adams <coppero1237(a)gmail.com> wrote: How did globbing come about in unix? It's been present at least since the PDP-11 migration. The Thompson shell, used in the 1st through 6th Editions, used a separate program called /etc/glob to do the dirty work, presumably in order to keep /bin/sh as small as possible. Unfortunately, glob never got its own man page, so its protocol for communicating with the shell is lost, unless someone remembers it and writes it down (hint, hint). Related, as regexes were already well known because of qed/ed, why wasn't a > subset of regular expressions used instead? The use of * and ? along with file extensions preceded by dot (as in ".c" and ".o") are, or so it seems to me, an inheritance from the DEC operating systems, starting with Monitor (later called TOPS-10) in 1964 and going right through OpenVMS. In the file systems used by those OSes, the "filename" (typically up to 6 characters) and the "extension" (typically up to 3 characters) were stored separately both on disk and in memory, and the separating dot was parsed by user programs before invoking the appropriate kernel routine. (That is why it is still true in WIndows that "foo" and "foo." refer to the same file.) Because dot was not in any way magic to the Unix file system, and because file names were limited to 14 characters, extensions were kept short. However, the path that leads from DEC OSes to CP/M to MS-DOS to Windows has kept the 3-letter extension alive, and we now see plenty of it in Unix-style OSes. Thus using dot to mean "any character" would seriously collide with this well-established usage as the extension separator. 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, though Prime Computer's PRIMOS also had it and may have been earlier by a year or two. "It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time." Both were direct descendants of Multics; I have not been able to find out anything about TIL that GNU find(1) supplements the standard -name option (which globs against the filename) with -regex (which matches the regex against the whole path). John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org The Imperials are decadent, 300 pound free-range chickens (except they have teeth, arms instead of wings, and dinosaurlike tails). --Elyse Grasso

Possibly wrongly, I judge glob by things like how simple it is, to use it doing "rename *.foo to *.bar" or "find filenames with spaces in them, and rename to be - separated" The problem typically is shell expansion. Those damn quoted quotes. I think set noglob; <do things>; set glob is often under-appreciated.

On 7 Oct 2020 03:22 -0600, from arnold(a)skeeve.com: I like rename from https://metacpan.org/release/File-Rename for that purpose. It takes a regular expressions (actually, Perl expression, so could in principle be any valid Perl code) plus a set of file names, and renames each file according to the regexp. Plus you don't need to worry about things like quoting within the command as with the above, and it even has -0 for when reading those extra-exotic file names from stdin. (For one thing, I hope none of your files has a space or a semicolon in its name with your style of rename as-is. :)) In Debian, that's https://packages.debian.org/stable/rename; I suspect other systems with reasonably large package repositories also offer it prepackaged. About the only downside is its dependence on Perl (after all, that's rather heavyweight), but then again a lot of other things also depend on Perl so it's kind of hard to have even a minimal modern system that doesn't have Perl installed... Having to escape every '.' would probably be even more annoying than modern GNU ls's default non-"-N" behavior; and worse in the sense that _most_ of the time, it would probably work without escaping it, but when it doesn't work, it would break in various spectacular fashions. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 11:18:38AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: I wrote the same thing and strangely enough, I also used = as a * replacement. http://mcvoy.com/lm/move.shar

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 5:51 AM Michael Kjörling &lt;michael(a)kjorling.se&gt; wrote: In Debian, that's https://packages.debian.org/stable/rename; I suspect Not always, though. Some distros package GNU rename < https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/rename.1.html> instead, which can only convert a fixed string to another fixed string. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org Original line from The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold: "Only on Barrayar would pulling a loaded needler start a stampede toward one." English-to-Russian-to-English mangling thereof: "Only on Barrayar you risk to lose support instead of finding it when you threat with the charged weapon."