Re: unavoidable wildcard expansion on Windows 7

[Bruno Haible]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Since '^' is a quoting character in cmd.exe, maybe you can try whether
> > it helps to protect "*" inside double-quotes on Windows 7? That is,
> > try to pass arguments such as
> >   ^*
> >   ^^*
> >   "*"
> >   "^*"
> >   "^^*"
> >   \"*\"
> >   \"^*\"
> >   \"^^*\"
> >   ^"*^"
> >   ^^"*^^"
> 
> I've now tested these, and as expected, they don't help on Windows 7.
> 
> My conclusion is that ^ is processed entirely by cmd.exe in its
> application code, whereas globbing code in MSVCRT does not assign any
> special meaning to that character.

Thanks for testing.

There are many programs that except to get a wildcard expression or
regular expression on the command line, such as
  csplit expr find grep nl ptx sed tac tr

What's the recommendation for using these as mingw binaries?

Or shall we claim they're unsupported on mingw, and only supported as
Cygwin binaries (where Cygwin handles the wildcard expansion according
to the old rules)?

Bruno