Re: [9fans] bug or a feature?

["Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>]

"rob pike, esq." wrote:
> This is long-standard behavior for shells.  Feature.

Indeed, but since so many other aspects of Unix were rethought
for Plan 9, it deserves some consideration; it's certainly
contrary to simplicity and regularity.  Perhaps someone knows
the history of this decision, but my *guess* is that it was
deemed to be more useful in "typical" interactive use:
	% cp foo.* bar
	cp: foo.*: nonexistent file
As of 6th Edition Unix there was a separate "glob" utility.

For some purposes, e.g. find . whatever -print | xargs ...
I find myself providing an extra argument "/dev/null" to
the command invoked under xargs control; e.g. when it's
"grep" and I want to be sure to see the filename even if
the grep is invoked with just one filename argument (that
works around an irregularity in "grep", again likely to be
due to thinking about interactive use).  Too bad there is
nothing similar that could be used as an "empty string"
placeholder.  (I introduced that notion in the 1999 C
standard as part of the specification for handling empty
arguments to function-like macros, and it made it easy to
be sure that the empty arguments didn't vanish until we
really wanted them to.)