python 2.7.12 on Linux behaving differently than on Windows

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 10:35 AM, Steve D'Aprano
<steve+python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> In the Unix world, I'm at the mercy of *one* program, the shell. In your
> ideal world, I'm at the mercy of EVERY program that implements globbing:
> each and every one has to independently offer a way to disable their own
> internal globbing. How is that an improvement?

Moreover, you're at the mercy of the one program *you chose* out of a
set of similar options (shells). There are some times when bash's
style of tab completion feels a bit clunky, and I'd really like the
"show a few options and let you pick with the arrow keys" style of...
is it zsh? And I have the freedom to choose that if I want to, without
reference to the program being invoked. Try doing THAT with the
Windows model. Can you make it so that, instead of expanding the whole
glob, you pop up something that lets you multiselect from within that
pattern? You type "cp *.c dest/" and it opens up a thing listing all
.c files and lets you choose which to copy? I don't know if there are
any shells like that, but *one could be written*, and it would
instantly apply not just to the copy command, but to every other
command you might want to use. Want to make symlinks to a whole bunch
of things? The ln command accepts multiple targets and a destination
directory. In Windows, you'd have to add this feature to every program
individually, or (more likely) produce a single overarching file
management program that has all these features. Oh, but then it
doesn't work if you want to invoke VLC on all those files, because the
programmer didn't think of that. Whoops.

ChrisA