To SAS-L:

Thanks to John Iwaniszek, Karsten Self, Mark deHaan, Richard DeVenezia, Raymond King, Ray Pass, Rob Rohrbough, and Ian Whitlock (and perhaps others) for their contributions on the UltraEdit "Replace in Files" problem. I'm appreciative of all the suggestions, but with due respect, can't help feeling that many of them are "workarounds" (some fraught with their own risks) and that this problem should be dealt with more "head-on". As Ian Mead (of the company that makes UltraEdit) says, UltraEdit's behavior feeds off an (I think) unfortunate behavior of the Windows "Command Prompt". At least in Win2K -- and, I presume, in earlier incarnations of Windows -- issuing, e.g. "dir *.sas" will give the ".sas" files but *ALSO* the "*.sas*" files such as "*.sas7bdat". It should be noted, though, that the "Search" or "Find" function (available by clicking on Windows "Start") will behave in I think a better way, giving only the "*.sas" files. To get e.g. ".sas7bdat" you have to search for "*.sas*" ... which is, I believe, as it should be.

Ian Mead of UltraEdit wrote me that he'd look into the Windows "Search" function ... hopefully he'll be able to use that as the source for UltraEdit's behavior, rather than the (I think) inherently dangerous "Command Prompt" model. As I said, I appreciate all the suggestions ... but from the standpoint of a naive user, I think that the UltraEdit "Replace in Files" behavior is a disaster just waiting to happen. Thanks again to all who discussed this issue,

--Tom Tom Frenkel <taf2@is8.nyu.edu> http://pages.nyu.edu/~taf2