Re: find: support all shell wildcards

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 04:21:56PM +0000, address@hidden wrote:
> But bash is the standard shell for GNU, so find ought to support the same 
> wildcards.

My point was that brace expansion is not wildcard expansion.
Bash performs, among others (see man bash):
brace expansion, tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion,
command substitution, arithmetic expansion, word splitting, and pathname
expansion.

``Wildcards'' are part of pathname expansion.

If find is to perform brace expansion too, what about the other ones?
In particular, parameter and variable expansion could be handy.
And perhaps command substitution and arithmetic expansion too.

> >To conclude, I beleive it's not a bug but a request for enhancement.
> 
> In that case I would request that you consider this enhancement.
> 
> Personally, I feel that the advantage of having the same patterns 
> supported by both find and the shell outweighs any philosophical concerns 
> about {} being different to the other wildcards when it is used in bash. 
> In any case, if find does not support {} wildcards then this should be 
> explicitly mentioned in the documentation, since just saying 'shell 
> wildcards' might lead many users to think they could use exactly the same 
> patterns as in the shell.

It doesn't sound that confusing to me.  But I'm probably biased and this
misunderstanding probably appears often, so the manual should include a note
about it.

In any case, my sceptic opinion is not very relevant.  I'm not the maintainer
of findutils, nor am I willing to work on this, sorry.

But I'd like to thank you that you wrote us about this.
Perhaps someone else will agree with you and your problem will be fixed...
And if you have any other idea, please write again.

Kind regards,
        Stepan Kasal