Philip Newton <[email protected]> wrote:
On 5/25/06, Martin Ebourne <[email protected]> wrote:
-? is nasty. Not only does it look ugly but it's not even a letter.
You have to escape it from your shell? Either you have files whose
name is simply hyphen plus another character in the current directory,
or you have a hateful shell.
% diff -?
zsh: no match
%
There are things to hate about zsh for sure, but I've yet to try a
shell which has a shorter list of things to hate.
? is a pattern character as you know. And I have zsh to abort a
command if I enter a pattern that doesn't match anything. This is a
good thing, because if I entered a pattern I sure expect it to match,
so if it fails I don't want the command to run because it'll probably
only go off and do something stupid.
As you say, if you have any file with a 2 character name starting with
a hyphen then all of a sudden -? doesn't work as a help option any
more, in any shell. That isn't hateful, it's downright vile.
Options should be letters, not symbols.
Cheers,
Martin.
