os error 123 in Windows 10 about fclones

[pkolaczk]

I'm afraid Windows default shell doesn't expand wildcards.
https://superuser.com/questions/460598/is-there-any-way-to-get-the-windows-cmd-shell-to-expand-wildcard-paths

You can use a combination of -R and --paths ... or --names ... to perform globbing with the builtin glob/regex support.

[PeWu]

Could you fix the documentation and error message? The current error message is quite misleading.

[pkolaczk]

The error message is created from the template: Failed to stat <path>: <reason>
The second part (reason) after the colon comes from the operating system. I can't fix it.

I can improve only the first part a bit. I guess "stat" is a Unix/Linux only thing.
What about Failed to read metadata of <path>: <reason> ?

[PeWu]

I don't think changing wording would help much. I wouldn't have guessed that the program is trying to use '*' as a file name. And even if I realized what the program tried to do, I wouldn't know what to do about it.

You could do something like:

if path contains '*':
  log warning 'It looks like your shell does not support expanding wildcards. Try using --paths or --names. See https://git.io/JJCLH for more information.'

[pkolaczk]

I like your suggesion, although I can imagine the warning could be also wrong and misleading - there is no reliable way of determining if the given file system accepts * (or any other character) as part of the path. E.g. on Linux * is a perfectly valid character in a path. The tool does not know if the user wanted to treat * as a wildcard, or maybe they wanted a literal *.

I can also imagine the above code could raise the warning even under shells that do support wildcard expansion.
E.g. this is a valid command under bash:
fclones -R '*' (search all contents in the directory named * )

[PeWu]

Thanks :)