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glob(7) — Linux manual page

glob(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual glob(7)

NAME top

 glob - globbing pathnames

DESCRIPTION top

 Long ago, in UNIX V6, there was a program /etc/glob that would
 expand wildcard patterns. Soon afterward this became a shell
 built-in.
 These days there is also a library routine glob(3) that will
 perform this function for a user program.
 The rules are as follows (POSIX.2, 3.13).
 Wildcard matching
 A string is a wildcard pattern if it contains one of the
 characters '?', '*', or '['. Globbing is the operation that
 expands a wildcard pattern into the list of pathnames matching the
 pattern. Matching is defined by:
 A '?' (not between brackets) matches any single character.
 A '*' (not between brackets) matches any string, including the
 empty string.
 Character classes
 An expression "[...]" where the first character after the leading
 '[' is not an '!' matches a single character, namely any of the
 characters enclosed by the brackets. The string enclosed by the
 brackets cannot be empty; therefore ']' can be allowed between the
 brackets, provided that it is the first character. (Thus, "[][!]"
 matches the three characters '[', ']', and '!'.)
 Ranges
 There is one special convention: two characters separated by '-'
 denote a range. (Thus, "[A-Fa-f0-9]" is equivalent to
 "[ABCDEFabcdef0123456789]".) One may include '-' in its literal
 meaning by making it the first or last character between the
 brackets. (Thus, "[]-]" matches just the two characters ']' and
 '-', and "[--0]" matches the three characters '-', '.', and '0',
 since '/' cannot be matched.)
 Complementation
 An expression "[!...]" matches a single character, namely any
 character that is not matched by the expression obtained by
 removing the first '!' from it. (Thus, "[!]a-]" matches any
 single character except ']', 'a', and '-'.)
 One can remove the special meaning of '?', '*', and '[' by
 preceding them by a backslash, or, in case this is part of a shell
 command line, enclosing them in quotes. Between brackets these
 characters stand for themselves. Thus, "[[?*\]" matches the four
 characters '[', '?', '*', and '\'.
 Pathnames
 Globbing is applied on each of the components of a pathname
 separately. A '/' in a pathname cannot be matched by a '?' or '*'
 wildcard, or by a range like "[.-0]". A range containing an
 explicit '/' character is syntactically incorrect. (POSIX
 requires that syntactically incorrect patterns are left
 unchanged.)
 If a filename starts with a '.', this character must be matched
 explicitly. (Thus, rm * will not remove .profile, and tar c *
 will not archive all your files; tar c . is better.)
 Empty lists
 The nice and simple rule given above: "expand a wildcard pattern
 into the list of matching pathnames" was the original UNIX
 definition. It allowed one to have patterns that expand into an
 empty list, as in
 xv -wait 0 *.gif *.jpg
 where perhaps no *.gif files are present (and this is not an
 error). However, POSIX requires that a wildcard pattern is left
 unchanged when it is syntactically incorrect, or the list of
 matching pathnames is empty. With bash one can force the
 classical behavior using this command:
 shopt -s nullglob
 (Similar problems occur elsewhere. For example, where old scripts
 have
 rm `find . -name "*~"`
 new scripts require
 rm -f nosuchfile `find . -name "*~"`
 to avoid error messages from rm called with an empty argument
 list.)

NOTES top

 Regular expressions
 Note that wildcard patterns are not regular expressions, although
 they are a bit similar. First of all, they match filenames,
 rather than text, and secondly, the conventions are not the same:
 for example, in a regular expression '*' means zero or more copies
 of the preceding thing.
 Now that regular expressions have bracket expressions where the
 negation is indicated by a '^', POSIX has declared the effect of a
 wildcard pattern "[^...]" to be undefined.
 Character classes and internationalization
 Of course ranges were originally meant to be ASCII ranges, so that
 "[ -%]" stands for "[ !"#$%]" and "[a-z]" stands for "any
 lowercase letter". Some UNIX implementations generalized this so
 that a range X-Y stands for the set of characters with code
 between the codes for X and for Y. However, this requires the
 user to know the character coding in use on the local system, and
 moreover, is not convenient if the collating sequence for the
 local alphabet differs from the ordering of the character codes.
 Therefore, POSIX extended the bracket notation greatly, both for
 wildcard patterns and for regular expressions. In the above we
 saw three types of items that can occur in a bracket expression:
 namely (i) the negation, (ii) explicit single characters, and
 (iii) ranges. POSIX specifies ranges in an internationally more
 useful way and adds three more types:
 (iii) Ranges X-Y comprise all characters that fall between X and Y
 (inclusive) in the current collating sequence as defined by the
 LC_COLLATE category in the current locale.
 (iv) Named character classes, like
 [:alnum:] [:alpha:] [:blank:] [:cntrl:]
 [:digit:] [:graph:] [:lower:] [:print:]
 [:punct:] [:space:] [:upper:] [:xdigit:]
 so that one can say "[[:lower:]]" instead of "[a-z]", and have
 things work in Denmark, too, where there are three letters past
 'z' in the alphabet. These character classes are defined by the
 LC_CTYPE category in the current locale.
 (v) Collating symbols, like "[.ch.]" or "[.a-acute.]", where the
 string between "[." and ".]" is a collating element defined for
 the current locale. Note that this may be a multicharacter
 element.
 (vi) Equivalence class expressions, like "[=a=]", where the string
 between "[=" and "=]" is any collating element from its
 equivalence class, as defined for the current locale. For
 example, "[[=a=]]" might be equivalent to "[aáàäâ]", that is, to
 "[a[.a-acute.][.a-grave.][.a-umlaut.][.a-circumflex.]]".

SEE ALSO top

 sh(1), fnmatch(3), glob(3), locale(7), regex(7)

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Pages that refer to this page: dpkg(1), grep(1), pmseries(1), semind(1), systemctl(1), systemd-analyze(1), whereis(1), fnmatch(3), glob(3), loader.conf(5), mdadm.conf(5), sysctl.d(5), systemd.exec(5), systemd.image-filter(7), uri(7), pam_succeed_if(8), rpm(8)

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