[plug] rpm globs!

[Leon Brooks]

A useful thing to know: rpm wildcard-expands (globs) its arguments, so...

If I download the latest Mandrake Cooker fileset and do a Freshen (Debian 
users think `dist-upgrade') I get this:

    rpm -Fvh RPMS*/*.rpm
    bash: /bin/rpm: Argument list too long

That's because the argument list (4033 files) won't fit in 32 pages (32k on an 
x86). And rpm admits of no mechanism for passing filenames other than on the 
command line. So I whipped out the sources to see how hard this was to fix. 
Lo! For there was globbing, so this...

    rpm -Fvh 'RPMS*/*rpm'

...works! It passes one argument to rpm, not 4033, and rpm expands that in its 
own time (and memory space).

Cheers; Leon