Glob (programming)

In computer programming, the verb glob or globbing is used to refer to an instance of pattern matching behavior. The noun glob is sometimes used to refer to a particular pattern, e.g. "use the glob "*.log" to match all those log files".

Many command line interpreters (shells) such as Unix shells, cmd.exe and Windows PowerShell, provide globbing on filenames at the command line and in shell scripts. [The [http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/globbingref.html "Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, Chapter 19.2: Globbing"] (Mendel Cooper, 2003) has a concise set of examples of filename globbing patterns.]

The term glob is also used to refer more generally to limited pattern matching facilities of this kind in other contexts:
* Larry Wall's "Programming Perl" discusses "glob" in the context of the Perl language.
* Tcl contains both true regular expression matching facilities and a more limited kind of pattern matching often described as globbing.
* Python has a "glob" module in the standard library which performs wildcard pattern matching on filenames.
* Ruby has a "glob" method for the "Dir" class which performs wildcard patten matching on filenames. Several libraries such as Rant and Rake provide a FileList class which has a glob method or use the method FileList. [] identically.

Etymology

glob() is a Unix library function that expands file names using a pattern-matching notation reminiscent of regular expression syntax but without the expressive power of true regular expressions.

References

ee also

* regular expression
* wildcard character
* wildmat