mleech (11/24/82)
I was browsing through the source for the Bourne shell the other day, and I ran across an internal shell variable called "FILEMATCH". Does anyone, offhand, know what it's used for, or am I going to have to WADE through Bourne's ALGOLesque code to find out what it's used for? Send any responses to me via mail. Marcus Leech, decvax!utzoo!mleech.
gwyn@Brl@sri-unix (11/27/82)
From: Doug Gwyn <gwyn@Brl> Date: 25 Nov 82 23:57:56-EST (Thu) FILEMATCH is never assigned to; the code that would do this is commented out. What this variable WOULD contain were it assigned is the last filename-pattern that did NOT expand into a list of files. In the case of $ command foo* for instance, where there are no files matching foo*, I believe FILEMATCH would contain "foo*". This is apparently a debugging aid. P.S. It only took 3 greps and a quick peek at service.c to arrive at this conclusion, and I'm not very familiar with the Bourne shell. (I hope I'm right; I didn't want to spend any more time on the matter.)