Re: [Caml-list] Wildcard expansion/command line

["T. Kurt Bond" <tkb@tkb.mpl.com>]

Maxence Guesdon writes:
> 
> > So, how does it work? 
> 
> *the shell* expands your unquoted wildcards before passing the args
> to your program.

Not so, strictly speaking.  Under MS Windows the O'Caml runtime
apparently expands wildcards itself, if the shell hasn't already.  (See
byterun/main.c:main() for the call to expand_command_line() and look 
at win32.c for expand_command_line() and its helper functions.)

What did it do under pre-X versions of MacOS?

I think that historically having the shell expand the wildcards for
the program was the *unusual* situation and having the program expand
the wildcards itself was usual.  The "program expands wildcards" has
its advantages (as anybody who has used the VMS command "$ rename
*.COM *.SAV" can attest) but having the shell do it makes most
programs simpler, which is probably why Unix ended up with the shell
doing the work.
-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkb@tkb.mpl.com

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