Globbing

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:48:16 +0000
Bill Hacker <wbh at conducive.org> wrote:

> After all, if use of find or xargs accomplishes the task w/o ill effects 
> on memory, then what prevents creation of a compiled utility that has 
> that same sort of 'flavor' of approach  - just hard-wired from the get-go?

	It would have to be a shell builtin otherwise the shell is going to
expand the wildcard and try and stuff it into an execve call and that's
where things fall over. Alternatively the new xrm would have to use a glob
syntax completely different to the shell glob syntax, or at least require
quoting globs, which would open a whole new can of worms.

	I've been caught this way too and I'd love a solution but it's not
easy to provide given that the shell does the globbing. I've often thought
that was a mistake but if so it's a hard one to unwind at this stage.

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