Yes, Bourne Shell's variable access scheme is a bit ghetto, but to me the problem is that the shell is doing globbing at all. Why not have the shell pass "*" through to the program, and have the program itself perform globbing? Then filenames would have no impact on how the command-line is parsed.
Because that's how MS-DOS used to work, and it was dumb. It means every program has to do globbing (or often, didn't do globbing). In any case, bash does get this right: ls * will pass the correct filenames to the ls program no matter what the filenames contain. Also quotes around variable expansions can cope with any characters.
So what? If the primary API used by command-line applications to open files does the globbing, then programs will have to go out of their way to not glob. And you'll get the added benefit that globs will only be applied to arguments that are actually meant to specify filenames. There would be none of this escaping "*" when you pass it to "find."
> In any case, bash does get this right: ls will pass the correct filenames to the ls program no matter what the filenames contain.
That doesn't solve the problem; your filename could be called "--help."
bash isn't interpreting '--help' at all, it is just passed on to the program being executed, and most GNU CLI programs conventionally interpret '--help' as a special option.
If your filename is indeed --help, the convention is to use '--' as the separator between your command line options and filenames. Anything after -- is not interpreted as a command-line option.
Another way would be to use a more qualified filename form ('./--help')
Because, as the author points out, different users may want different globbing behavior. Globbing is not performed identically between shells.
If the author so wished, he might trivially create his own shell and allow * to match dotfiles, with absolutely no disruption to the rest of his system. Or one could write a shell which uses a regex instead of a glob. Or the SQL LIKE query syntax. The possibilities are endless. Anyone is free to do this.
The fact is, the current globbing behavior in unix shells strikes a good balance between pedantic correctness and "what I really want." The author's frustration is due to his attempting to use a command line interface as a structured programming language.
