04-09-2025, 04:53 AM
This is a feature of the command line shell, not anything QB64 is doing, so from a program standpoint there's nothing that can fix this. If you use an unquoted * then the shell automatically expands it into a list of all the files in the current directory. * isn't the only special character either, plenty of other character do special stuff and require quoting (Ex. `>` and `<` for redirection)
Ideally anyone who uses command line programs often would understand the need to quote this kind of input so I wouldn't really worry about it much personally, it's just something to mention in documentation.
As for the `Modify COMMAND$` dialog in the QB64 IDE, that's an interesting case but I think having the IDE treat it as it would work on the command line (for that host) is probably the best behavior, even if it's a bit surprising. Any quoting we attempted would screw up the individual command entries (`Command$(i)`) so it would be annoying in different ways. Additionally it wouldn't really fix your problem, anybody who goes to use the program outside the IDE will still need to do the quoting so the IDE would be giving you a false sense of how it actually works in practice
Ideally anyone who uses command line programs often would understand the need to quote this kind of input so I wouldn't really worry about it much personally, it's just something to mention in documentation.
As for the `Modify COMMAND$` dialog in the QB64 IDE, that's an interesting case but I think having the IDE treat it as it would work on the command line (for that host) is probably the best behavior, even if it's a bit surprising. Any quoting we attempted would screw up the individual command entries (`Command$(i)`) so it would be annoying in different ways. Additionally it wouldn't really fix your problem, anybody who goes to use the program outside the IDE will still need to do the quoting so the IDE would be giving you a false sense of how it actually works in practice