Re: [9fans] mishandling empty lists - let's fix it

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

>   grep foo -- *
>
> will still not work because rc's globbing also fears zero and returns the
> pattern instead of an empty list if there are no matches.

i used to think that was a misfeature.
in college i wrote a shell that elided
failed globs in the argument list.

the problem is that people assume that
failed globs generate an error, e.g.
	cat «glob pattern» >[2=] || echo cat failed
i didn't redesign the system, so that would
hang with my shell.

if we follow your redesign of unix, we
would never get an error because
	cat *
does nothing and wouldn't be an error
at all.  one would need to write
	x = *
	if(~ $#* 0)
		echo cat failed
	if not
		cat $x
that seems less attractive to me.

- erik