1 Jun
2018
1 Jun
'18
1:09 p.m.
On 2018-05-31 03:00 PM, Stewart Russell wrote:
convert *.{png,jpg}
does *something*, but neither what you'd expect nor want)
Multics had an "equal name" feature that conspired with the star-name parser to do what you would expect. A program like convert could have used it like convert *.png =.jpg Name components that were matched by '*' could be retrieved to replace '=' in building a new file name. It probably only worked because star-names weren't expanded by the command shell. Each command program parsed its own command line (with heavy use of standard subroutines.) That way, the program had control over what command line arguments were being matched together.