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... what.

I was not expecting this. I've seen START refuse multiple arguments in this way, but I just assumed START was poorly implemented. I never expected DIR to refuse multiple arguments too! I suppose there must be a way to get DIR to list N named files in a directory, but this simple obvious and traditional way is not it. CMD.EXE's DIR accepts multiple arguments, it's just PowerShell's DIR which refuses them. Oh, I wonder, does PowerShell have a list syntax?

The error message gives away the secret: there's no "dir" command in PowerShell. You're actually using the Get-ChildItem cmdlet!


Indeed it does, although in PowerShell they're called arrays. Insert commas between your file names to turn them into an array.

Thanks!

...Aaand I see it's yet another language which refuses trailing commas. That's going to render impossible my habitual way of coding complex option lists. Can I concatenate list variables instead... probably, but I now see what kind of language PowerShell is: you have to explicitly specify everything. If I wanted to use a language this complex for little everyday tasks, I'd use Python because I know it already. Also, concatenating lists in Python uses the good old + operator and I don't have to look it up. I guess I'll install Cygwin or 9pm again, or maybe Tcl; weird as it is, because I half-way know it, too.

Is it that bad to specify everything? And for the record, PowerShell also uses + operator, though I imagine you looked that up already.


You could use WSL. Actually; if you simply want bash, you can just install bash on Windows, no?

¯\_ _/¯
It's not even a question of using a list; find under PS rejects wildcards. I can only suppose M$ considers the find command obsolete and not to be used with PS. I could install grep. I could use cmd instead of PS, but it never was a good shell.



Yes, it is that bad.


These days, Bash for Windows means WSL unless you use Cygwin or Msys2. I've had Msys2 installed before; it was problematic with my health issues. I installed Cygwin the other day, and it looks like it'll be worse. What's been happening is that my health has been preventing me from even looking at technical things for months at a time. Sooner or later, this breaks any rolling-release system, making it impossible to upgrade because critical parts of the system have changed too much since the last upgrade. This killed my last Msys2 installation, it has killed Termux installations on Android too, and it has killed quite a number of my native Linux installs over the years.

I may be able to use a more suitable distro under WSL, but I'm so tired of the whole Linux scene that this is something of a last resort. I'm more likely to use Msys2 again, (primarily because I'm familiar with it,) and when it breaks I'll simply back up the homedir and reinstall it. As home is on a native Windows filesystem, this will be simple.

The command seems to be working for me, I think? I'm not familiar with cmd, but here is what it does for me on both.

If I were to take a guess, I think it's the PowerShell parsing messing you up. Perhaps, it replaces "*.fth" with whatever it thinks should go there? Because the EXE program that's being run seems to be the same. You could try the following:

Though from what I can understand on how cmd's find works, this should be the equivalent:

Or if you want to go down each directory recursively:

Also, I don't exactly see how you have to specify "everything" in PowerShell exactly? I'm not familiar with cmd, but I have used bash quite a bit. I don't see how it's that much more verbose, really. Mind explaining?

Scratch what I said here. I've switched to Linux some time ago (I think it has been a few months, not sure) and I see it clearly now. Bash is just so much cleaner. I was brainwashed by Windows

I know, right? And I'm used to Rc (from Plan 9) which is even cleaner than Bash.


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