Wildcards and special characters in shell

Is there anywhere, where the special characters used in interpreting strings in the shell is documented?? I know that *N is newline, but is there a character for tab as well? I tried *T, but it doesn't seem to work...

Also I could use a brushup on the general use of wildcards, but I can't seem to find anything in sys:Documentation...

@alfkil

i'm also new to the shell in AmigaOS. for wildcards i use two options:

1. if i only want one and only one character wild, i use the '?' operator. for example:

System:> dir foo.?.txt

2. if i want any number of characters wild, akin to the '*' operator in the POSIX world, i use '#?' instead. for example:

System:> dir foo.#?

hope this helps.

-- eliyahu

@thread

i would also recommend this site for amiga manuals in PDF form. commodore-era manuals, application and game manuals, scanned books, all available.

there are amigaDOS manuals there -- old, but still useful. another source for the original, combined amigaDOS manual circa 1986 can be found here.

-- eliyahu

There are loads of wildcards - your best bet is the ParsePattern() AutoDoc.

Not sure about escaped characters though - I'd suggest the AmigaDOS 3.1 (or 3.5 updated) manual. I'll have a look through some of my old amigaDOS manuals when I get home to see if I can find a comprehensive list.

@alfkil
Quote:
The OS3.1 DOS manual only list 4 pairs of special characters for use in AmigaDOS commands: *E *N *" ** There may be an ANSI/ASCII escape sequence for embedding a TAB but I've never seen an example of that.

Quote:
Look at the DOS autodoc in the SDK under the ParsePattern() function.

Thanks for all the input, I think I am getting a hang of it now.

Strange, though, that there is no way to send a tab character to a program, that could have been really useful.

The reason I am looking for this, is because I am looking for easy ways to replace strings in large sourcecode files with other strings. Now I am looking at sed the stream editor, and I think from using it a little and cross refering what I do on my pc, I think that sed has problems with the * character. I checked the DOS prefs, and "use asterisk in patterns" is turned off.

I'm trying to replace strings using something like this:

Original file:
DC.B "string",10,0

Wanted result:
.string "string"
.byte 10,0

sed command:
> sed "s/DC.B\t\"\([[:space:]0-9a-zA-Z]*\)\",\([01,]*\)/.string \"\1\"\n\t.byte \2/" myfile.asm >.log

Under cygwin it works, but on amiga it doesn't (in shell or sh). I was trying to look for the sources of sed on aminet, but it seems to be down... What to do??

You don't need a special character to represent tab. Just press the tab key.

To escape the * character just enter another * (**).

@thomas

The tab key is used for completion in Shell, so all tabs entered are swallowed. At least that's what it does here.

I have tried double ** with sed, but it still doesn't work.

Surely sed will use \t for tabs? Doesn't it use Perl-style regular expressions?

@alfkil
I can't help but think that it must be possible to embed tabs in AmigaDOS with escape codes but I can't get it to work. However, I have found a dumb way to send tabs to a text file using AmigaDOS. Here is an example:

eval 0x9 LFORMAT "%C" >ENV:tab
echo "Testing tabs" >ram:test NOLINE
echo "$tab" >>ram:test NOLINE
echo "here." >>ram:test

If you enter the above commands in a shell, you should end up with a line containing a TAB before the word "here" in the file ram:test. If you can't find a better way, you should be able to use my method.

>alfkil
Is there anywhere, where the special characters used in interpreting strings in the shell...
What's the context? DOS or ABC shell?

>Chris
Surely sed will use \t for tabs? Doesn't it use Perl-style regular expressions?
ABC shell uses all the commands from "Bash" doesn't it! Best formatting text processing language is AWK.

If using sed compiled with clib2 set

DISABLE_COMMANDLINE_WILDCARD_EXPANSION

read clib2/include/dos.h

for more info

Ideally the app should have set the flag internally but some clib2 utils haven't

I'd just see the sed documentation for numeric, ie. use the hexadecimal value for *, I did this for some other character when I needed it (you need 0x2A).