hadeishi@husc4.harvard.edu (mitsuharu hadeishi) (10/30/86)
About the pattern matching DELETE, etc. . . The syntax I mentioned in a previous posting (i.e. "copy (firstfile|nextfile|anotherfile) destinationdirectory") of course is not an optimal syntax; it would be better if the syntax were fixed so such tricks were not necessary. It is not optimal because the whole directory has to be searched in order to find the three files that match the pattern; the command doesn't know that the pattern just specifies three files; it checks to see if each file in the directory matches the pattern. However, it is still probably faster than typing COPY over and over, particularly for medium-sized directories, and it is certainly a speed advantage for people with big RAMdisks or people running script files off of the disk (i.e., copying a subset of the c: directory to ram: would be much faster with this method, as long as the pattern matcher doesn't choke with too many (||||||||) alternatives.) -Mitsu