Globbing (was Re: HAMMER update 10-Feb-2008)

[talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr]

Bill Hacker wrote:

> Matthew Dillon wrote:

>>     hours while csh eats up all the memory on your machine and everything
>>     comes to a grinding stop.  It doesn't work.
>> 
>>     People need to learn to use find, xargs, awk, etc.
>> 
>> -Matt
>> Matthew Dillon
>> <dillon at backplane.com>
> 
> 
> All manner of insects have been found preserved in amber, so why not a
> DragonFly?
> 
> But they didn't *choose* to be fossilized.
> 

Bill, i agree completely with Matt. Of course you can increase the size
of the buffer so that more globbing stuff fit in, since machines have bigger
memories nowadays. But there will always exist side cases where one needs
to be more sophisticated. Moreover using globbing to removes thousands
files at one stroke exposes us to the famous 'rm a *' instead of 'rm a*'
which certainly occurred at least once to each of us. Taking time to think
about one wants to do, and how to do it, is better than using blind
automatisms. And if you have carefully crafted names in your files you may
end up removing far more than you wanted using globs, where find has
special construct to fight against this trick ( -print0 ).

> Bill