List command repeats forever, how to solve?

[StoneOakvalley]

Hi there,

Regarding AmigaDOS/CLI......

If directories and/or filenames contain especially characters like ? and *, the "list all" command repeats forever...... example of dir structure:


hest? [Dir]
frosk
disk?.info
disk*.info

issue a command like
"list ALL"

repeats the listing forever with "hest?".....nothing else will be shown. It basically stops at ? and *, possibly other chars too.

How to solve this? Escape character or something?

[Amiga1992]

Well, you shouldn't be using ? or # in filenames, as #? is the wildcard, like "*" is in DOS.

I am surprised you are even allowed to use such a character in a filename.

[Minuous]

IIRC you can use a backtick in front of the character for AmigaDOS to take it literally rather than as a pattern-matching character?

[StoneOakvalley]

I tried the backtick, but dont know if I did it correctly, and working examples?
Some of my attemps even managed to lock up the cli really......and none of my attemps managed to list out anything at all.

I came across http://www.ghira.mistral.co.uk/amiga/newbie.html
"When the next character is normally a wildcard, ` makes it act normally. This is necessary if you have files with #, ? etc. in their names. But you probably don't want files like that - they're more trouble than they're worth."

I know I wont use them anyhow, but it's about what other people did..back in the days :-)

The problem is that I'm scanning thousands of disks using list command, and sometimes, well, these swapper and/or elite dudes, back in the days used to write a lot of strange elite characters in filenames, like "fast eddie" with

"Wanna contact?" or similar for a dirname.

I myself stopped using space, komma, paranteses, questionmark etc. many many years ago on both Amiga and Windows, just because a filename is a filename, not a written sentence.

But what I cannot understand is that list is a command, if I wanted to list wildcards, sure, #? would be part of my option in the command line....but when the list command should list contents why does it suddenly rely on command line rules when it's supposed to simply print it out...is beyond me...must be a bug really.

Almost the same logic that the list command would execute every listed file it came across during print out, if it was .iff, .ilbm, .8svx etc..and do something about it :-) Does not make sense in my book.

[emufan]

what about the gnu coreutils m68k 5.2.1-9 or csh 5.50a from aminet!?

edit: 'ls' command of csh does work with "dummy?" and "help#" folder name.
may need to set "-z format" for output listing (i think) to fit the amigados 'list' command.
'ls' of coreutils just gives " error -1" , while eg. 'basename' from same package just works. not sure here.
ixemul.library 63.1 for coreutils you can find here - amiga.sourceforge.net.

[StoneOakvalley]

Hi Emufan,

That coreutil and stuff became to dense for me to mess around with. So, I was lucky (keeping your tip for ls in mind) and came over this single handle tool:

http://aminet.net/package/util/cli/fsearch

It does redirect out all 100% well, here's an actual output that normal list command would repeat endlessly....

tests/output.txt                0 25-Jan-14 00:24:12 
tests/FSearch                5716 14-Oct-99 10:59:16 
tests/BindDrivers            1420 06-Jul-94 12:39:07 
tests/ChangeTaskPri           460 06-Jul-94 12:39:07 
tests/sopp/nose?/AddArchive  1016 05-Feb-95 03:33:40 
tests/hoy?/disk.info         1164 23-Jan-14 23:08:41 
tests/disk?.info             1164 23-Jan-14 23:08:41 

I have a project where I have listed over 170000 adf diskimages (all contents) already and more to be done, but many of the disks had to be edited manually to prevent that failed output from normal list command.

[Minuous]

>But what I cannot understand is that list is a command, if I wanted to list wildcards, sure, #? would be part of my option in the command line....but when the list command should list contents why does it suddenly rely on command line rules when it's supposed to simply print it out...is beyond me...must be a bug really.

Yes, it is a known and fixed big. This bug was fixed for List V43.3. From the official changelog: "Added a fix to avoid looping on "List ALL" with directory names that contain pattern matching characters."

Ie. the version provided in OS3.9 (and maybe OS3.5, haven't checked) doesn't have this bug. You must be using OS3.1 or some other obsolete version.

[StoneOakvalley]

Minuous, yes, true, I'm running v1.3, 2.04, 3.0, 3.1 workbench here all the time during different needs :-)

So, it was a bug indeed. How nice to know, thanks so much!

Edit: I tried List from Workbench 3.5 and it actually worked! (found on AmigaOS39-p00h.iso)