>>Actually,  if you're  listening out  there,  Eric, this  is something  I
>>wouldn't  mind seeing  changed in  a future  release. To  me, it  always
>>seemed like the requirement of *@*  was confusing, and I've had to coach
>>others through it.
>
>Under MS-DOS, you have to do *.* to affect all files. Under VMS, you have
>to do *.* and possibly *.*;* while under VM it's * * or * * *, and so on.
>The point  is that  there is  a convention,  it is  arbitrary, it  can be
>confusing  the first  time, and  no  matter what  you choose  it will  be
>confusing to  some and intuitive  to others. The only  thing to do  is to
>learn the convention.  If you change it, you'll just  be changing the set
>of people  to whom it  is confusing, and making  all the people  who were
>used to the old convention very  angry, not to mention the possibility of
>screwing  up an  entire list  because you  thought *  = all  users on  my
>system.
 
Hmmmm...good point. Guess I've been using Unix too long....
 
Would it be practical to add some sort of user-specific preferences for
these kinds of things? So that I could tell listserv that, when I said *
was everybody, but Jenny Admin across the hall still uses her old *@*?
Likewise, for specifying modifiers, so that Jenny could still use (netwide,
while I could use -netwide. And so on.
 
I'm not sure that I'd make this an especially high priority, but it could
make a nice addition to the interface, especially if it came with sets to
mimic other operating systems
 
>  Eric
 
b&
 
----
Ben Goren
 Arizona State University School of Music
 Internet: [log in to unmask]
 BITNet: BenGoren AT ASU