The initial goal when developing ALL was to have a tool that would be able to execute one or more operating system commands on an arbitrary list of files. Thus ALL could only read and understand file specifications from a file or a pipe, at first. Such file specifications could be generated manually or by programs like DIR (on DOS) or DIRECTORY (on OpenVMS).
ALL was later enhanced to understand wildcard file specifications so that it would not always require its input to come from another command that could produce such input files.
As the idea of constructing flexible commands from a file specification also seemed promising for the transformation of normal data, especially when it existed in a somewhat consistent format, ALL was enhanced to be able to read input in a prescribed fashion, allowing use of the input fields in the output.
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