Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/15/03:59:33
On Feb 02, 1997 at 08:47:47AM -0600, Nicholas R LeRoy wrote:
> I'm certainly in agreement, but f we're going this far, why not just do
> good ol' regular expressions? It's sometimes useful to be able to specify
> regex's like:
>
> ls {a,b,f}[^a]*
>
> Which (unless I'm mistaken) would match all files with a a, b, or f as
> the first character and anthing *but* an a as the second character.
>
> Then again, most of you probably know regex's already....
Hmm, that's not a regular expression as such. While it maybe part of a
filename globbing system, it isn't a regular expression.
BTW, to code what you said as a regular expression it would be something
like (and this is one option, I'm sure there are more):
^[abf][^a]
Anyway, that aside, yes, it would be very handy. However, there is one
small(ish) problem with all of this. How far do you want to take it?
While support could be built into COMMAND.COM for the internal
commands, what happens about external software. You could have the
shell do the globbing, as with most/all Unix shells, but that would
work with very little software. If we are talking about 4Dos style
support then that would be excellent.
[Hmm, I wonder what could be done about building support for the extended
wildcard system at the findfirst()/findnext() level inside OD itself....]
To be honest, if OD COMMAND.COM doesn't end up being a clone of 4Dos
then something is wrong anyway. :-)
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