Glob (programming)


In computer programming, glob patterns specify sets of filenames with wildcard characters. For example, the Unix Bash shell command mv *.txt textfiles/ moves all files with names ending in .txt from the current directory to the directory textfiles. Here, * is a wildcard standing for "any string of characters" and *.txt is a glob pattern. The other common wildcard is the question mark, which stands for one character.
In addition to matching filenames, globs are also used widely for matching arbitrary strings. In this capacity a common interface is fnmatch.

Origin

The glob command, short for global, originates in the earliest versions of Bell Labs' Unix. The command interpreters of the early versions of Unix relied on a separate program to expand wildcard characters in unquoted arguments to a command: /etc/glob. That program performed the expansion and supplied the expanded list of file paths to the command for execution.
Later, this functionality was provided as a C library function, glob, used by programs such as the shell. It is usually defined based on a fnmatch function, which tests for whether a string matches a given pattern. Both functions are a part of POSIX: the functions defined in POSIX.1 since 2001, and the syntax defined in POSIX.2. The idea of defining a separate match function started with wildmat, a simple library to match strings against Bourne Shell globs.
Traditionally globs do not match hidden files in the form of Unix dotfiles; to match them the pattern must explictly start with .. For example, * matches all visible files while .* matches all hidden files.

Syntax

The most common wildcards are,, and.
WildcardDescriptionExampleMatchesDoes not match
matches any number of any characters including none,, or ,, or
matches any number of any characters including none,, or., or
matches any single character,, or
matches one character given in the bracket or or
matches one character from the range given in the bracket,, up to , or

In all cases the path separator character will never be matched.

Unix-like

On Unix-like systems, is defined as above while has two additional meanings:
WildcardDescriptionExampleMatchesDoes not match
matches one character that is not given in the bracket,, or
matches one character that is not from the range given in the bracket,, up to and etc.,, or

The ranges are also allowed to include pre-defined character classes, equivalence classes for accented characters, and collation symbols for hard-to-type characters. They are defined to match up with the brackets in POSIX regular expressions.
Unix globbing is handled by the shell per POSIX tradition. Globbing is provided on filenames at the command line and in shell scripts. The POSIX-mandated case statement in shells provides pattern-matching using glob patterns.
Some shells support additional syntax known as alternation or brace expansion. Because it is not part of the glob syntax, it is not provided in case. It is only expanded on the command line before globbing.
The Bash shell also supports the following extensions:
Windows shells, following DOS, do not traditionally perform any glob expansion in arguments passed to external programs. Shells may use an expansion for its own builtins:
Windows and DOS programs receive a long command-line string instead of argv-style parameters, and it is their responsibility to perform any splitting, quoting, or glob expansion. There is technically no fixed way of describing wildcards in programs since they are free to do what they wish. Two common glob expanders include:
Most other parts of Windows, including the Indexing Service, use the MS-DOS style of wildcards found in CMD. A relic of the 8.3 filename age, this syntax pays special attention to dots in the pattern and the text. Internally this is done using three extra wildcard characters,. On the Windows API end, the equivalent is, and corresponds to its underlying. Both open-source msvcrt expanders use, so 8.3 filename quirks will also apply in them.

SQL

The SQL operator has an equivalent to and but not.
Common wildcardSQL wildcardDescription
matches any single character
matches any number of any characters including none

Standard SQL uses a glob-like syntax for simple string matching in its LIKE operator, although the term "glob" is not generally used in the SQL community. The percent sign matches zero or more characters and the underscore matches exactly one.
Many implementations of SQL have extended the LIKE operator to allow a richer pattern-matching language, incorporating character ranges, their negation, and elements of regular expressions.

Compared to regular expressions

Globs do not include syntax for the Kleene star which allows multiple repetitions of the preceding part of the expression; thus they are not considered regular expressions, which can describe the full set of regular languages over any given finite alphabet.
Common wildcardEquivalent regular expression

Globs attempt to match the entire string, whereas, depending on implementation details, regular expressions may match a substring.

Implementing as regular expressions

The original Mozilla proxy auto-config implementation, which provides a glob-matching function on strings, uses a replace-as-RegExp implementation as above. The bracket syntax happens to be covered by regex in such an example.
Python's fnmatch uses a more elaborate procedure to replace the pattern to a regular expression.

Implementations

Beyond their uses in shells, globs patterns also find use in a variety of programming languages, mainly to process human input. A glob-style interface for returning files or an fnmatch-style interface for matching strings are found in the following programming languages: