[Python-Dev] Re: [Python-checkins] python/dist/src/Lib warnings.py,1.19,1.20 (original) (raw)

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake@acm.org
Thu, 15 May 2003 00:43:57 -0400

Charles G Waldman writes:

I'm afraid I must be missing something terribly obvious here, but why would you need to escape a dot on a command line? None of the shells I'm familiar with treat dot as a metacharacter. Isn't `?' the standard shell metacharacter for "any character"? Filename patterns on the shell command line are "glob patterns", not RE's.

It's not the shell that treats it as a metacharacter, but the RE syntax. Preventing "." from being treated as an RE metacharacter would be done by inserting a "" character, which is a shell metacharacter, and would need another "" to escape that, so that one of the "" would end up in the RE.

Of course, my favorite way of dealing with this is to use single quotes around the argument rather than backslashes; that works fine in sh-syntax shells, and doesn't require doubling-up backslashes.

-Fred

-- Fred L. Drake, Jr. PythonLabs at Zope Corporation