[Info-vax] Unix and DCL shells

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/8/2024 1:25 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2024-01-08, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 1/8/2024 10:35 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
>>> On 1/8/2024 9:21 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>> Things I would like to see from bash in DCL:
>>>>
>>>> Filename globbing.
>>>
>>> Don't have a clue what globbing is.  Probably don't want to know anyway.
>>
>> Wildcard expansion in the shell not the program.
>>
>> If you have a VMS Basic program that you run with:
>>
>> $ mcr []df *.bas
>>
>> then your Basic program sees one argument with *.bas and can lookup
>> the matching files with LIB$FIND_FILE or whatever.
>>
>> If Simons idea get implemented and enabled then your Basic program
>> would see N arguments with DF.BAS, X.BAS, Y.BAS etc. - DCL would expand
>> the wildcards instead of leaving it to the program.
>>
>> It is a *nix thing.
>>
> 
> It also has much more powerful pattern matching than DCL offers, which
> is why I would like to see it on VMS.
> 
> For David's benefit:
> 
> https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/globbingref.html
> 
> DCL doesn't have anything that even begins to compare with that.

But there are two aspects:
1) VMS *% vs the let us call it "regex like"
2) whether it happens in DCL or inside .EXE/.COM file

The first one is not so hard. There will be some decisions to make
regarding syntax as [] may not be a good choice on VMS. But when
syntax is agreed then I assume that a change to SYS$SEARCH
will make LIB$FIND_FILE and F$SEARCH work.

The second could be a little tricky to implement without
breaking too much.

Arne