The GNU C Library - Globbing

Node: Globbing Next: Regular Expressions Prev: Wildcard Matching Up: Pattern Matching

Globbing

The archetypal use of wildcards is for matching against the files in a directory, and making a list of all the matches. This is called globbing.

You could do this using fnmatch , by reading the directory entries one by one and testing each one with fnmatch . But that would be slow (and complex, since you would have to handle subdirectories by hand).

The library provides a function glob to make this particular use of wildcards convenient. glob and the other symbols in this section are declared in `glob.h'.

Calling Glob Basic use of glob .
Flags for Globbing Flags that enable various options in glob .


Next: Regular Expressions Up: Pattern Matching