Shell globs

Globs, is associated with certain kinds of 'match this pattern'.

also called shell globs, because they are mainly seen in command lines

Compare with regular expressions, which are more powerful (but still single-string) ways of expressing patterns.

Shell globs

Shell globs match fairly simple patterns. you can only use:

? meaning one character of anything, and

* meaning any amount of characters of anything

...anything except the directory separateor, / {{(or presumably \ if imitated in windows)}}

[chars] meaning any one of the characters in this set

can also be used to match a literal ? or *

[!chars] meaning anything other than the characters in this set

I've seen [^chars] manage the same, though this isn't quite standard [1] and is more of a regexp-ism

If you have both a fnmatch and glob function:

• fnmatch() is a "matches a single given string with this pattern"

(probably nothing related to the filesystem unless you do it yourself)

• glob() is likely to read directory entries from your filesystem and returns all matching filenames

apparently fnmatch() is used in the glob() implementation

Modern globs

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

The classics mentioned above existed since the 1970s.

People have tried to extend it occasionally.

Most such extensions ended up local to a specific shell, language, or such.

A few did get picked up more widely.

No single adopted standard, so you still have to read the manual of what is supported, but the common addition is:

• ** meaning 'any number of path segments', i.e. recursing

(frequently called globstar matching)

and to a lesser degree:

• {a,b} matching alternatives

You see this in various ignore files, things like git's pathspec, bash in 2009(verify)[2] python's glob.glob since 2015ish [3] node in