[Info-vax] Unix and DCL shells

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Thu, 11 Jan 2024 13:52:52 -0000 (UTC), Simon Clubley wrote:

> Fine. Then add the globbing pattern capabilities to the current VMS
> wildcard lookup APIs without changing anything else. That gives you the
> same ability to use more powerful pattern matching expressions on VMS
> without having to change anything else in your code.

I’m not really sure that’s worthwhile. One could argue that the existing 
VMS wildcard patterns are already equivalent in power (or a bit beyond, in 
the case of “...”), based on the corresponding constructs in the filename 
specs.

Regular expressions, on the other hand, are somewhat more powerful. I did 
one project where I had to do my own globbing against user-provided 
patterns in the usual shell-wildcard syntax, and I found it easier to 
convert those wildcards to RE patterns, and use those to scan against a 
list of filenames, than to use the provided glob-expansion services.