Talk:Glob (programming)

message: Someone suggested that this article be merged with Wildcard character.  I do not think merging it with any other pattern matching article would be a good idea, because "globbing" and "glob" do have a specific technical meaning: they refer to a particular pattern matching behavior.  Those who know this will come here looking for a page about that specific behavior.  I think it would be better to leave this as its own page, and add cross-references to pages about other sorts of pattern matching as appropriate. --Karl Fogel 19:28, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: opposition to proposed merge

message: I was wondering how common the use of the word glob to describe units of 8 bytes was?In this case 1Glob = 64bitsNote:1bit = 1^3 bits, 1 'cubic' bit1Byte = 2^3 bits 1 'cubic' '2bit' 'volume'1Glob= 4^3 bits, 1 'cubic' '4bit' 'volume'obviously a '3bit' volume is not used.?????HappyVR 12:00, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: disambiguation - minor use of word

message: The TV show has nothing to do with the Unix command. If it is notable, please give it a separate article and create a disambiguation page offering the choice of TV show and Unix command. 82.113.133.7 10:42, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree LeinadSpoon 00:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

text: I support this idea. Tim.bounceback(talk | contribs | ubxen) 21:29, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

text: I agree as well. Meliadoul 02:05, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Two unrelated meanings on one page

message: What is the origin of the use of the English word 'glob' to indicate wildcarding?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.7.175.2 (talk) 23:05, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The man page just says cryptically "glob -- global", so I guess we know for a fact that glob is short for global, but why "global" is still unclear. Richard W.M. Jones (talk) 21:27, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps it's simply invented jargon (rather than using "wildcard expansion").  There's a lot of NIH from that quarter TEDickey (talk) 21:34, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Etymology 

message: It's my understanding that "globbing" is a term used only
when the search is done over the file system.
That's how it works in the shells I know, in Perl and in the Python 'glob' module –
you cannot glob over a list of strings, and using grep(1) to filter lines from a
file is not considered globbing.
The article only seems to reflect this indirectly.
I have no reference for this though. Just the GNU libc manual, which says
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".
JöG (talk) 10:03, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Restricted to the file system? 

message: The section Implementations calls out cmd.exe as a program that performs globbing. I believe this is actually a counter-example. At least in the bad old days of command.com, the called program has to glob for itself because the shell did not do it.
Jeberle (talk) 03:46, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: As I recall it, neither does globbing.  googling on "cmd.exe wildcards" suggests that's correct - that cmd.exe does not do wildcard expansion.  Interesting, filename-completion is described here as a special case of wildcard expansion TEDickey (talk) 09:47, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  cmd.exe to glob? 

message: According to the table, ? in COMMAND.COM and cmd.exe matches 0 or 1 characters, but in reality its behavior is the same as in UNIX: it matches exactly one character.  Thus, CA?T.TXT will match CART.TXT and CAST.TXT but not CAT.TXT.
However, the pattern CAT?.TXT does match CAT.TXT.  This is because, internally, this file name is stored as CAT·····TXT, with 5 blank characters after CAT, and unlike in UNIX-like systems, the ? can match these blank characters.  —Cousteau2 (talk) 00:23, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meaning of ? in MS-DOS 

message: The entry in this column is the same for every row, it is really necessary?
Brvman 22:22, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It isn't the same for every row. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:47, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Type column in Syntax Table 

message: Classes in java.io.Files have their own definition of globbing that supports ** and also supports choice from a set of possibilities using {a,b,c}. See http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/io/fileOps.html. Might be worth including? Sorry for not just doing it myself - might come back and do it if I find time...
31.151.248.127 (talk) 04:14, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Might be.  Odd that the curly-brace thing is not mentioned here (a csh feature from long ago). The "**" idea isn't new with Java (VMS provided a way to reference wildcards across directory levels, using different syntax, that was the inspiration for "ellipsis" in vi-like-emacs more than 20 years ago). TEDickey (talk) 09:23, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Java 

message: I have noticed that MS Excel and MS Word support globbing in their respective search (and replace) dialog boxes (MS Sharepoint at least does not support it). They do it each their own way (tested in MS Office 2007 SP3):
* Excel supports ? (exactly one char) and * (any string) but no groups or ranges, the escape character being ~ (tilde).
* Word supports a wide range of what they call "Special characters" (a whole subset of regular expression operators) beyond who we can find ? and * (you must check a box in the "options" frame of the search dialog to enable it).
Since SAP globbing is mentionned, could be worth adding MS Office as well. --GinkoAloe (talk) 13:07, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Microsoft Office 

message: Beautifying ASCII codes like that is an error. TEDickey (talk) 15:43, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Three dots versus ellipsis character 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: T-SQL supports the […] operator. The reference used in the SQL section is for T-SQL. That said I don’t think the SQL section should be based on T-SQL. Instead, it should be based on standardised ANSI SQL. PennyTraps (talk) 14:55, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  SQL […] operator 

message: The redirect Glob (programming has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached.  Utopes (talk / cont) 01:47, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[:Glob (programming]]" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]]