Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [MERGE REQUEST] changeset translation preparatory work

[William Dode]

Colin Walters <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 01:50, Tom Lord wrote:
>  
>> Look at it this way:  it turns out that your shell has a bug.   There
>> are certain perfectly legitimate, perfectly legal filenames that, if
>> actually used, cause your shell to spazz.
>>
>> What's to do about this?  You describe yourself and the others you
>> cite making a similar complaint as "hackers".  I believe you.  Hackers
>> would respond to this annoyance by fixing it --- fix your damn shell.
>> So, that's what you should do.
>
> My shell could be better, for sure.  Right now it basically assumes that
> when you type a {, you always mean it in the metacharacter sense (unless
> it's quoted of course).  But even if it was changed to allow you to do
> completions using { as a regular character, you'd still have to do more
> work to tell the shell in which sense you mean it.  The Linux kernel
> actually has a directory called "arch".  If I hit {a<TAB>, I could be
> talking about either.  zsh is actually pretty nice in that it lets you
> cycle between completions, so I could hit {a<TAB> to get a list, <TAB>
> to pick the first one, then <TAB> to pick the second.  In bash, you just
> wouldn't be able to complete it.  All this pain comes from using shell
> metacharacters in filenames users were expected to manipulate (I say
> "were", because with my inventory patches you shouldn't have to
> anymore).  There's really no reason to use shell metacharacters in
> filenames.  They're just not worth the pain they cause, even in an ideal
> world where every shell handles them as gracefully as possible, and
> every user's machine in the world has been magically upgraded.

Why don't you make a symbolic link with \{arch\} and .arch ?

-- 
William Dodé - http://flibuste.net