- From: Albert Lunde <Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu>
- Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 18:55:59 -0600 (CST)
- To: hallam@w3.org
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
>Note one trick that VMS allows and UNIX fails on :-
>
>rename *.jpeg *.jpg
>
>The value from wildcard #1 is used as the replacement key in wildcard #2. This
>trick does not extend to well, multiple *s become difficult. But it is a very
>usefull facility that when I ask UNIX appologists how to do it they tend to 1)
>try to explain why I should not want to be able to do that 2) extol the virtues
>of full regular expressions, or 3) unearth a 2453 line perl script which reads a
>directory then produces a csh script which performs the renaming operation.
>
>Point is that making the matching facility too complex may be counter
>productive. I'm in favour of very simple systems which behave as expected.
I tend to think that a structural wildcarding scheme, which could distingush
host vs. path, and perhaps the heirarchical structure of the path
might be useful (as witness examples from VMS) but it could get complicated
(as witness examples from VMS BACKUP.)
One issue, perhaps especially when treating matching as a simple string
operation would be to identify the cannonical form used, to match
for example when dealing with percent-escaped characters.
--
Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu
Received on Friday, 23 February 1996 16:58:01 UTC