Questions about windows support

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 05:10:35PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> I've just thought of (ie, gotten bit by) another thing that would be
> nice about having the commands do their own globbing:
> 
> If the applications glob on their own insted of the shell, then for
> safety they can choose to restrict the number of file args they take
> to whatever makes sense for their own individual purpose.
> 
> For example, suppose you want to delete everything inside a given
> subdirectory (but keep the directory itself). So then you (mis)type:
> 
> $rm somedir/ * -rf
> 
> Note the subtle space before the "*". I just did that by mistake
> earlier today, and the damage set me back a few hours (could have been
> much, much worse, though). I don't think there's much, if anything,
> that can realistically be done to protect against that right now. At
> least without getting really hacky.

If rm did its own globbing, it could warn the user before proceeding
with a mass deletion involving *. (IIRC DOS's 'del' used to do this.)
With the shell doing the expansion, there's no easy way to do this.


> But, if rm was expected to do its own globbing instead of the shell
> doing it, then rm could say: "Ok, it only makes sense for you to give
> me one file/path at a time. Want more? Run me multiple times or use a
> glob pattern (or hell, a regex pattern, or use a special explicit
> 'accept multiple paths' mode, etc)." Then:
> 
> $rm somedir/ * -rf
> ERROR: rm only takes one path at a time
> $rm somedir/* -rf  # ok
> $rm somedir/ -rf  # ok
> $rm * -rf  # ok
> 
> With the shell doing the expansion, that sort of thing isn't even
> possible.

I guess you could have a flag for when you explicitly want to specify
multiple filenames:

	$ rm abc.d def.d
	ERROR: rm only takes one path at a time
	$ rm -m abc.d def.d	# ok
	$


> Works with other stuff too:
> 
> $cp a b c
> ERROR: You gave me a source path and a destination path, but then you
> gave me *another* path! What the hell you expect *me* to do with it?
[...]

But sometimes you want to copy multiple files to a destination dir. But
I suppose you can always use a glob or specify an option to say "yes I
really want to copy multiple files into a target dir".


T

-- 
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. -- Sammy