Wildcards¶

Some disc commands accept a glob pattern in the INNER_PATH — disc find to locate matching paths, disc cp, disc mv, disc rm, disc chmod, disc lock, disc unlock, disc set-load, and disc set-exec to apply an operation across every matching entry. The pattern language belongs to the filing system, and the CLI defers to it: on every Acorn filing system (DFS, ADFS, AFS, ROMFS, and ZIPped Acorn files) the wildcards are * and #, matching is case-insensitive, and a pattern is anchored to a single filename component unless an explicit recursive flag is given. A filing system that declares no syntax of its own falls back to Unix wildcards (* and ?); disc describe-filesystem reports what a given filing system uses.

Metacharacters¶

Pattern	Matches
`*`	Any sequence of characters (including the empty sequence)
`#`	Exactly one character

? is not a wildcard on the Acorn filing systems — it is an ordinary filename character, so a file catalogued as ZALAGA? is addressed by that literal name, and $.S# (not $.S?) matches a two-character name beginning S. The single-character wildcard on Acorn is #. (A DOS/FAT filing system, by contrast, uses ? for that role; the table above is the Acorn set.)

Matching is case-insensitive on every supported filing system: Acorn catalogues preserve case but compare without regard to it. *HELLO, *Hello, and *hello all match a file catalogued as HELLO.

disc find 'image.adl:*'              # every file on the disc
disc find 'image.adl:$.Games.*'      # everything in $.Games
disc find 'image.adl:S####'          # four chars starting with S

Anchoring and recursion¶

A pattern matches against one filename component at a time. The literal . between components is a delimiter — patterns do not cross it implicitly. $.G* finds every entry of $ whose name starts with G; it does not match $.Games.Elite because Games and Elite are separate components.

Commands that walk into subdirectories carry an explicit -r / --recursive flag (disc cp, disc rm, disc chmod, disc lock, disc unlock). For wildcard-driven searches across the whole tree, disc find traverses every directory and matches the pattern against both the bare filename and the fully-qualified INNER_PATH of each entry:

disc find 'image.adl:Elite'         # any file named "Elite"
disc find 'image.adl:$.Games.*'     # everything directly under $.Games

On a partitioned hard disc, disc find emits each result with the partition selector that would feed back unchanged into a follow-up command:

$ disc find 'scsi0.dat:*'
      matches      
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Path            ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ adfs:$.!BOOT    │
│ adfs:$.FS3v126  │
│ afs:$.HOLMES    │
│ afs:$.MORIARTY  │
│ afs:$.Passwords │
└─────────────────┘

Addressing a literal `*` or `#`¶

Because * and # are pattern characters, a file whose name contains one cannot be singled out by typing that name — the command reads it as a glob. As a pattern, guard#1 matches guard#1 and guard41 alike (# is “any one character”), so a plain disc cp 'disc.ssd:$.guard#1' … copies both.

Pass --no-wildcards to switch that command to literal matching, so the name addresses exactly the file that bears the character:

disc cp --no-wildcards 'disc.ssd:$.guard#1' 'out.ssd:$.guard#1'

The flag is accepted by every command that expands a pattern against existing entries — disc cp, disc rm, disc chmod, disc lock, disc unlock, disc set-load, and disc set-exec — and the default is --wildcards (patterns on). Path structure is still parsed under --no-wildcards: the . between components remains a separator, so only the wildcard metacharacters are taken literally.

Commands that already address a single path literally need no flag. disc get and disc cat navigate their INNER_PATH verbatim, so disc get 'disc.ssd:$.guard#1' . extracts that one file with no expansion. A worked end-to-end example — creating guard#1 / guard#2 and retrieving one of them — is in the cookbook.

Filename length matters¶

Acorn filing systems impose per-component length limits. Patterns must produce names that fit, or the match will simply find nothing:

Filing system	Max filename	Directory naming
DFS	7 characters	Single-character directories (`$` and `A`..``Z``); these do not nest
ADFS	10 characters	Hierarchical directories, 10 characters per name
AFS	10 characters	Hierarchical directories, 10 characters per name

DFS directories do not nest. The $ and A..``Z`` letters that appear before the dot are real directories in the everyday sense — they contain files and you list them with disc ls — but a directory cannot itself contain another directory. A pattern like A.M* finds files in the A directory whose names start with M; a recursive flag has no work to do on a DFS image because there is nothing below the top-level directories to recurse into.

Filename matching is case-insensitive, but filename creation is case-preserving. disc cp host.txt 'image.adl:Hello' stores the file as Hello; subsequent disc ls will show it as Hello, and hello, HELLO, HellO will all find it.

Wildcards and the shell¶

Shells expand their own wildcards before disc ever sees the arguments. A bare * on a POSIX command line will be replaced by the matching files in the host’s current directory, not by anything in the disc image:

$ ls
bashrc  hello.txt  scsi0.dat
$ disc find scsi0.dat:*
#  shell expands  scsi0.dat:*  to  scsi0.dat:bashrc scsi0.dat:hello.txt
#                                   scsi0.dat:scsi0.dat
#  → three "image not found" errors

Quote the INNER_PATH to keep the pattern literal:

disc find 'scsi0.dat:*'
disc find "scsi0.dat:*"

The same applies to # on some shells (it’s a comment character in bash and zsh when unquoted at the start of a word) and to $ (parameter expansion). The full platform-by-platform breakdown lives in Shell quoting cheat sheet.