glob

Back to Computer-Science-Concepts

Specifies sets of filenames using wildcard characters. Used in unix terminal for specifying groups of files. Notably used in .gitignore.

Glob patterns are anchored at either end, a* would match at but not cat since the pattern is anchored on the left by the a.

Wildcard	Description	Example
`*`	matches anything	*.txt => [README.txt, anytextfile.txt ...]
`?`	matches a single character	?at => [cat, bat, sat...]
`[abc]`	matches one of given characters	[CB]at => [Cat, Bat]
`[a-z]`	matches one char in range
`[!abc]`	matches one char not in given
[!a-z]`

in some cases (gitignore) you can start patterns with a foward slash / to avoid recursivity
end a pattern with / to match directories

Example of gitignore:

# no .a files
*.a

# but do track lib.a, even though you're ignoring .a files above
!lib.a

# only ignore the TODO file in the current directory, not subdir/TODO
/TODO

# ignore all files in the build/ directory
build/

# ignore doc/notes.txt, but not doc/server/arch.txt
doc/*.txt

# ignore all .pdf files in the doc/ directory
doc/**/*.pdf