Shell globs: Difference between revisions

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Compare with [[regular expressions]], which are more powerful (but still single-string) ways of expressing patterns.
Compare with [[regular expressions]], which are more powerful (but still single-string) ways of expressing patterns.
That said:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions."
Now they have two problems. [https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-have-two-problems/]

Revision as of 14:57, 28 November 2023

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

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


...very simple ones, usually only:

? meaning one character of anything, and
* meaning any amount of characters of anything
...anything except the directory separateor, / {{(or presumably \ if imitated in windows)}}


see also fnmatch(), which is a "does a single name match this glob"

whereas glob() both walks your filesystem and returns all matching filenames

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


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