[Info-vax] Unix and DCL shells

[Dan Cross]

In article <unhlca$qpj$1 at panix2.panix.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>>
>>It also has much more powerful pattern matching than DCL offers, which
>>is why I would like to see it on VMS.
>
>regexps are built into a lot of Unix utilities at fairly low levels and
>this is incredibly powerful.
>
>But I cannot say "mv *.txt *.dat" in order to change every file extension
>in the current working directory.  This is the downside.

True, but there are things like http://mcvoy.com/lm/move.shar
that give you such functionality.

People often forget that the globbing functionality in Unix is
entirely internal to the shell (though, in fairness, there are a
couple of userspace libraries that provide essentially the same
thing), and the shell is just another userspace program, so if
one really wanted, one could always replace the shell with
something that did wildcard expansion differently.  Of course,
how that would _expand_ in e.g. the `mv` case is another
matter.

	- Dan C.