Mingw parameters wildcard

[g-willems]

Hello,

I'm facing a weird issue when using grep (ucrt64): command line arguments containing wildcards seem to be automatically expanded by grep itself. This does not happen with the msys2 version.

For example, I wanted to grep double-stars in a specific file, /usr/bin/grep works as expected:

$ /usr/bin/grep --fixed-string -- '**' some_file.txt
This line contains ** 

but when using /ucrt64/bin/grep, I get instead:

$ /ucrt64/bin/grep --fixed-string -- '**' some_file.txt
.bash_profile:if [ -f "${HOME}/.bashrc" ] ; then
.bash_profile:  source "${HOME}/.bashrc"
.profile:  if [ -f "${HOME}/.bashrc" ]; then
.profile:    source "${HOME}/.bashrc"

--> here ** gets expanded with the list of files in the current directory ($HOME in my case), then the 1st file of the list (would be .bashrc here) is used as search pattern and grepped in other files!!

This issue reports a similar problem, it points to a feature --enable-wildcard activated in mingw-w64-crt-git that seems to be the rootcause.

I've a few questions about this:

• what is the advantage of enabling the wildcard in MINGW packages? in particular, which concrete usecase does it solves?
• shouldn't the wildcard expansion be done by the calling shells, instead of the application themselves?
• isn't that risky to make core programs behave differently on Windows vs Linux?
• has this an impact on POSIX compliance?
• and more importantly, is there a way to disable this without recompiling mingw packages? e.g. with an environment variable, like msys2 controls the paths conversion?