> Date: Thu, 10 May 2012 09:28:38 -0700 > From: Paul Eggert <[email protected]> > CC: Bruno Haible <[email protected]>, [email protected] > > On 05/10/2012 09:20 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > If I'm not missing anything, I submit that '*' should be removed from > > the list of special characters. Leaving it there means that it will > > be impossible to invoke programs with arguments that include > > wildcards. > > In the context of 'diff' we don't want "*" to be a wildcard; > we want it to be just a literal "*". In this sense "*" > is just like " " in a file name.
But a general-purpose gnulib function cannot possibly know what the calling application wants. Perhaps there should be a special flag to request escaping wildcards, and then 'diff' should use that flag.
