There’s a plan to add more shell-like features to backticks in the future, which is why we’ve deprecated unquoted/unescaped shell metacharacters in backticks in 0.6. In the future this kind of globbing may be built in, and Julia will effectively implement a basic portable shell in backticks, including pipelines, I/O redirection and probably globbing and home directory expansion. It would also allow cool things like splicing a Julia task into a pipeline or reading to/from arbitrary Julia I/O objects. I was going to try to do this for 1.0 but realized that it was a ton of work and can be added in 1.x now that we’ve deprecated shell metacharacters.
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