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From: Andrew Main <zefram@tao.co.uk>
Message-Id: <199805050848.JAA03893@taos.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: foo(:...) and foo~ glob
To: hzoli@cs.elte.hu (Zoltan Hidvegi)
Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 09:48:54 +0100 (BST)
Cc: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu
In-Reply-To: <199805022027.PAA09387@hzoli.home> from "Zoltan Hidvegi" at May 2, 98 03:27:13 pm
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Zoltan Hidvegi wrote:
>the (:quals) syntax no longer works.  The idea was that foo(:...) should
>not do globbing if there are no wildcard, but it should execute the
>modifiers.

It was always documented as working on names of existing files.
It's useful functionality, of course, but...

>            This is very useful for general text manipulation.  Of course
>${${:-foo}:...} still works, but it's quite ugly.

But this is more meaningful, and how often are you actually applying
qualifiers to a literal string rather than a $ expansion?

I'm trying to keep this as simple and orthogonal as possible.  (:quals)
is part of the glob syntax, and ${:quals} is part of the parameter
expansion syntax.  The latter is the proper syntax for manipulation
arbitrary strings.

>ls *~
>rm foo~
>dd if=~/foo of=bar
>
>etc.  None of these work anymore.

Good point.  I'll change this back.

-zefram