[Python-ideas] Add OS-dependent automatic glob support

[Paul Moore]

On 5 January 2015 at 20:33,  <random832 at fastmail.us> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2015, at 05:10, Andrew Barnert wrote:
>> It seems to me that if you want auto-globbing support on Windows, the
>> "right" way to do it is to link in the fancy setargv instead of the
>> default one. This handles wildcards exactly the same way the
>> command.com/cmd.exe builtin commands do, which I suspect is what Windows
>> users would actually be expecting of they passed a wildcard on the
>> command line. (I think the docs no longer guarantee that this is true,
>> but it's probably still true, and certainly closer to true than if you
>> try to do it manually.)
>
> The problem with that is that if you do that you can no longer pass in
> _non_-filename arguments that contain a question mark or asterisk (and
> happen to match a file). Better to do it inside the program, when you
> actually know the argument you're looking at is intended to be a
> filename spec. Which, I assume, is _why_ it's not done by default when
> you compile a C program.

Just as a note - I find the fact that Python *doesn't* allow the C
runtime to do its glob-mangling of the supplied command arguments a
very useful feature, and I would not want it to be "fixed". The
setargv behaviour in the MSVC runtime is full of arcane corner cases
and quoting gotchas, and I wouldn't want it imposed on me by default.

Paul