Accidentally setting home

[suvayu ali]

On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 9:01 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I was under the impression the shell accepts simple globs like '?' for
>> any single character and '*' for any one or more characters hence I
>> assumed it is an ls feature. I just read the "pattern matching"
>> section in 'man bash' and realised I was misinformed. :)
>
> The use of regular expressions for filename matching dates back to the
> beginnings of Unix. In fact on 16-bit machines it was actually done in a
> separate program called /etc/glob, called by the Shell when needed,
> since otherwise the Shell process would have been too big for the
> address space (64Kb :-). Those days have long gone of course.
>
> BTW this is where we get the verb "globbing" meaning "filename
> expansion".
>

Always a pleasure every time you pitch in with these wonderful
historical anecdotes. :)

> poc



-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.