Introduce ifconfig -a -g groupname

[Chris]

On Fri, 29 May 2020 11:42:25 -0700 (PDT) Rodney W. Grimes freebsd-rwg at gndrsh.dnsmgr.net said

> > On Fri, 2020-05-29 at 19:57 +0700, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > > 
> > > Currently "ifconfig -a" command that shows status of network
> > > interfaces
> > > may be combined with flags -d or -u to limit the list to interfaces
> > > that are down or up.
> > > 
> > > The change https://reviews.freebsd.org/D25029 allows it to filter the
> > > list
> > > by name of interface group with additional flag -g groupname, or -g
> > > ^groupname to negate condition
> > > (this is different from "ifconfig -g groupname" that shows interface
> > > names only
> > > and that behaviour is not affected with the change).
> > > 
> > > I chose caret symbol (^) was choosen to ease both scripted and
> > > interactive usage
> > > so it does not require extra quotation/escaping, but was told
> > > that caret would require escaping in the zsh.
> > > 
> > > So I ask for suggestions which symbol to choose instead of caret.
> > > Benedict Reuschling suggested @ and I'm fine with it
> > > if we don't care about Perl code that would require escaping it when
> > > running shell code.
> > > 
> > > For thouse who interested, these are supposed usage examples:
> > > 
> > > to exclude loopback from the list:
> > > 	ifconfig -a -g ^lo
> > > to show vlan interfaces only:
> > > 	ifconfig -a -g vlan
> > > to show tap interfaces that are up:
> > > 	ifconfig -aug tap
> > > 
> > 
> > An @ to express negation is insane.  The only characters that have some
> > precedent for meaning negation are ~ and !.
> 
> And perhaps the original ^, for me anyway.
> 
> > Escaping is a fact of life, asking people to remember crazy things like
> > @ meaning not is far more onerous than occasionally needing to put
> > quotes or escapes on something.
> 
> Agree with that fully.
> 
> I actually do not like special tokens in arguments to options,
> and prefer the suggested use of a different option for exclude,
> as in -G vlan to exclude gruop vlan.
> 
> I can not think of a command of the top of my head that does
> exclusion by special token in option argument and can think
> of many with --include --exclude type options.
FWIW I'd like to add a +100% on this. It just somehow seems
an awful lot more intuitive.

--Chris
> 
> > -- Ian
> -- 
> Rod Grimes                                                
> rgrimes at freebsd.org
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