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created by prole

(thing) by kaatunut (6.7 y) (print)   ?   (I like it!) 1 C! Fri Nov 03 2000 at 15:07:00

The mark of absolute DoS stupidity, "*.*" has come to equal "everything". This is because creators of the Quick And Dirty Operating System were either too incompetent or just didn't give a shit for clean implementation; the "." in FAT filenames isn't really a dot, it's just what is displayed between the 8th and 9th character in the 11-character filename. Of course, characters n - 8 might be invisible, but that doesn't change anything. So, "*.*" really would mean "glob '*' to name1 and glob '*' to name2 and take whatever matches.

...except that this isn't so either. I don't know if they considered it taking too much CPU, but the '*' isn't a true glob-* either. Try "*foo*.*" - it will match anything, except in decent shells. This leads me to believe that in micros~1 pattern matching standard, '*' is defined as "absence of '*' in the beginning of string is equivalent to regexpian '^', and absence of '*' in the end of string is equivalent to '$', '*' anywhere else will just fsck everything up".


printable version
chaos

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