Shell globs: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:03, 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

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

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]

If you have both a fnmatch and glob function:

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

glob() is likely to both walk your filesystem and returns all matching filenames

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

@@ Line 2: / Line 2: @@
 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.
-...very simple ones, usually only:
+Shell globs match fairly simple patterns. you can only use:
 : {{inlinecode|?}} meaning ''one'' character of anything, and
 : {{inlinecode|*}} meaning ''any'' amount of characters of anything
@@ Line 15: / Line 19: @@
-See also {{search|fnmatch()}}, which is a "does a single name match this glob"
+If you have both a fnmatch and glob function:
+* {{search|fnmatch()}} is a "matches a single given string with this pattern"
-whereas glob() both walks your filesystem and returns ''all'' matching filenames
+:: (probably nothing related to the filesystem unless you do it yourself)
-: apparently fnmatch() is ''used'' in the glob() implementation
-Compare with [[regular expressions]], which are more powerful (but still single-string) ways of expressing patterns.
+* glob() is likely to both walk your filesystem and returns ''all'' matching filenames
+:: apparently fnmatch() is ''used'' in the glob() implementation