From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <4109a95286b1ab5e60c5fff7b21cfa01@collyer.net>
From: Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] bug or a feature?
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Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 16:49:21 -0700
Topicbox-Message-UUID: ab22d124-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

I've always understood the utility of passing through a failed glob pattern
to be that some programs do their own globbing (as I recall, find and tar
are the two main candidates, maybe restor) and if the user forgets
to (or deliberated doesn't) quote the pattern and it doesn't match anything,
the program gets to glob it.  How useful this is may depend upon your
feelings about quoting in general.

I do think that the current behaviour is more helpful than expanding
to a null list would be.  If the pattern doesn't match, you've very likely
made a mistake.  I'd rather have ``cat ?akefile'' print

	cat: can't open ?akefile: '?akefile' directory entry not found

and exit than have it just sit there reading standard input.