Re: Insensitive wildcard matching

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 09:47:10 +0200
> From: Alessandro Vesely <address@hidden>
> > 
> > IMNSHO, Make on Windows should _always_ prefer non-shell echo.exe if
> > it can be found.  That's because echo.exe's functionality is a
> > superset of what the Windows shell builtin can do, so you lose
> > nothing; what you gain is the ability to have Unixy features in
> > Makefile's.  (If one wants the shell builtin, one can always say
> > something like "cmd.exe /c echo ...".)
> 
> But how does one know echo.exe does echoing its arguments rather than
> being, say, an echology adventure game?

If a user has an incompatible program called echo.exe, he/she deserves
what they get.  It is as insane as having a program called cmd.exe
that is not the Windows shell.

> Users that already installed sh.exe probably don't need such
> sophistictions anyway...

The point is precisely that you don't have to switch your shell to
enjoy the power of a (ported) Unixy echo.exe.  Switching to a Unixy
shell is a very hard decision; many users don't want to do that, but
they do want to be able to run Unixy Makefile's.

> As you pointed out a week ago, the DOS port doesn't work under Windows.

I never said anything like that: the DOS port _does_ work on Windows
(I use it that way all the time).  What I did say was that if you use
the DOS port to invoke Windows programs (as opposed to using it to
invoke DJGPP programs), you will have nasty problems, like too short
command lines, incompatibilities in environment variables (PATH vs
Path) etc.

> (The MS link.exe, at least the version coming with MSVC 5, wants case
> sensitive environment variables.)

DJGPP programs support case-sensitive variables, but Windows forcibly
upcases them when it prepares the environment block for a DOS program.