Mathimagics

Has anybody else come across this problem?

Command window DIR command with wildcards sometimes reports an unmatched item. Since it and VB6 use the same Win32 API FindFirstFile the bug occurs in VB6 Dir$() function just the same way:

• s=dir$(agdlf & "arb*4*")
  do: ?S: s = dir$(): loop while len(s)

• Arbitrary_GDL_4.lst
  Arbitrary_GDL_4.txt
  Arbitrary_GDL_6.txt

• s=dir$(agdlf & "arb*1*")
  do: ?S: s = dir$(): loop while len(s)

• Arbitrary_GDL_10.txt
  Arbitrary_GDL_10_Invalid.txt
  Arbitrary_GDL_10_Pending.txt
  Arbitrary_GDL_4.lst

Mathimagics

That's on Windows 7 (Home). The directory contains many other similar files with different digits but the wildcard bug only occurs for 1 and 4.

I presume the Del command uses the same wildcard processor so I'm glad I didn't find this bug the hard way

dilettante

The comments for FindFirstFile (scroll down) suggest there are lots of traps awaiting the unsuspecting. Could be an artifact of many layers of backward compatibility attempts over three decades.

AtmaWeapon

I think the answer is probably explained in this Raymond Chen post. Unfortunately he didn't explain how the algorithm that was adopted after that one is abandoned. But I'd be willing to bet things get wonky when there's multiple wildcards involved. I seem to recall having trouble with multiple * wildcards in the past and ultimately giving up. Maybe "arb*4.*" will work better? From the given context it doesn't look like there's anything between the number and the dot. I'd expect your wildcard to pick up "Arbitrary_GDL_40.txt" and I'm not sure if that's what you wanted either.

In .NET I'd say use the EnumerateFiles() method for efficiency and a regex for greater accuracy. That's not to say every now and then regex doesn't make me go bonkers. In VB6 I'm sure there's a similar trick.

OnErr0r

Since you're using 7, try FindFirstFileEx with FindExInfoBasic (also works on server 08 R2). It appears to omit 8.3 names, so maybe they won't match either. Unfortunately this doesn't help with code running on previous unsupported OSes.