[Mailman-Users] BIG discard problem

[Brad Knowles]

At 6:47 PM -0400 2004-08-11, David Relson wrote:

>  In this case, you're mistaken.  The double quotes work fine for this
>  purpose (though the '-w' should be removed).

	If it's in double quotes, the shell will still try to interpret 
the wildcard.  If you want to protect it from that, you need to put 
it in single quotes, or put a backslash in front of the asterisk -- 
even though it's within the double quotes.

	The exact behaviour will differ depending on which shell you're 
using, but all shells I know of, from Bourne shell under BSD Unix 2.9 
running on a PDP 11/70 in 1984 up through tcsh, bash, ksh, and other 
more advanced shells running on more modern machines, will all try to 
interpret what they think is a wildcard unless it is properly escaped 
-- either through quoting or application of preceding backslash 
characters.

>  The egrep command is intended for scanning mailman's source code with
>  the goal of finding the relevant html (or html generator) in order to
>  determine the cgi parameters for discarding deferred items.

	Then this needs to be done in a specific subdirectory tree which 
would include Python source code and not other general data files, 
such as $MAILMAN_HOME/Mailman or $MAILMAN_HOME/bin, because otherwise 
you still run into the possibility of trying to throw 20,000+ files 
at it.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.