Re: bug in globber?

[Emin Gun Sirer <egsirer@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

>rc doesn't seem to be able to glob through a directory without having
>read permission; sh can.

I think (and Byron can correct me if I'm wrong) this is because rc globs
all the elements of a path if there is globbing anywhere within it. That
is, given "foo/../foo*" rc will first match "foo" against everything in ".",
".." against everything in foo (for which it needs read permission) and
"foo*" against stuff in "foo/..". 

This was done to keep the implementation simple and rc's globber works
correctly, which is a lot more than what one could say about some other
shells.

If this is not changed, perhaps it should be documented. I believe the
comment regarding globbing disappeared some time between 1.2 and 1.4.
If someone spends the time to fix this AND NOT BREAK anything else, so
much the better.

Judging by the comments in 1.4beta (which I am running), there seems to
be code to check for metacharacters in each path element and glob only
occasionally; however, trace still shows that every directory on the path
is read.

Gun.

P.S. Someone forgot to add the controversy about hash not introducing a
comment if it is not preceded by white space (e.g. lpr -#2), my personal
pet peeve, to the wish list.