Message-ID: <19970214183356.63660@hagbard.demon.co.uk> Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 18:33:56 +0000 From: Dave Pearson To: opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Subject: Re: ~OD: Re: [opendos] [OpenDOS] Wishlist part 2 References: <9702140408 DOT AA26247 AT norsun DOT norland DOT com> <9702140847 DOT ZM20951 AT dopey> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Hagbard's World In-Reply-To: <9702140847.ZM20951@dopey>; from Nicholas R LeRoy on Feb 02, 1997 at 08:47:47AM -0600 Sender: owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Precedence: bulk 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. :-) -- Take a look in Hagbard's World: | w3ng - The WWW Norton Guide reader. http://www.acemake.com/hagbard | ng2html - The NG to HTML converter. Also available in the UK: | eg - Norton Guide reader for OS/2. http://www.hagbard.demon.co.uk | dgscan - DGROUP scanner for Clipper.