GLOB(1)

NAME
glob - output pathnames matching a pattern

SYNOPSIS
On the command-line:

    glob 'eenie{meenie,mynie,moe}*.[ch]'

DESCRIPTION
When this program was originally created, *perl* did not have a builtin "glob" feature and would rely on the *csh* to do the work for it. With Perl v5.6 in March 2000, the File::Glob module has done that work without interacting with *csh*.

  Pattern Matching Syntax for Filename Expansion
The expressions that are passed as arguments to glob must adhere to csh/tcsh pattern-matching syntax for wildcard filename expansion (also known as globbing). Unquoted words containing an asterisk ("*"), question-mark ("?"), square-brackets ("[...]"), or curly-braces ("{...}"), or beginning with a tilde (~), are expanded into an alphabetically sorted list of filenames, as follows:

"*" Match any (zero or more) characters.

"?" Match any single character.

[...]
    Match any single character in the given character class. The character class is the enclosed list(s) or range(s). A list is a string of characters. A range is two characters separated by a dash (-), and includes all the characters in between the two characters given (inclusive). If a dash ("-") is intended to be part of the character class it must be the first character given.

{str1,str2,...}
    Expand the given "word-set" to each string (or filename-matching pattern) in the comma-separated list. Unlike the pattern-matching expressions above, the expansion of this construct is not sorted. For instance, "{foo,bar}" expands to "foo bar" (not "bar foo"). As special cases, unmatched "{" and "}", and the "empty set" (the string {}) are treated as ordinary characters instead of pattern-matching meta-characters. A backslash ("\)" may be used to escape an opening or closing curly brace, or the backslash character itself. Note that word-sets may be nested!

"~" The home directory of the invoking user as indicated by the value of the variable $HOME.

~username
    The home directory of the user whose login name is 'username', as indicated by the password entry for the named user.

Only the patterns *, ? and [...] imply pattern matching; an error results if no filename matches a pattern that contains them. When a period or "dot" (.) is the first character in a filename or pathname component, it must be matched explicitly. The filename component separator character (e.g., / or slash) must also be matched explicitly.

OPTIONS
When the first argument is -0 (a minus sign followed by the number zero), then a NUL character ("\0") is used to separate the expanded words and/or filenames when printing them to standard output. Otherwise a newline is used as the word/filename output separator.

RETURNS
When glob is invoked as a script from the command-line, the exit-status returned will be 0 if any files were matched or word-sets were expanded; 1 if no files/word-sets were matched/expanded; and 2 if some other kind of error occurred.

DIAGNOSTICS
If no filenames are matched and pattern-matching characters were used ("*", "?", or "[...]"), then an error message of "No Match" is issued. If a user's home directory is specified using tilde-expansion (e.g., "~username") but the corresponding username or their home directory cannot be found, then the error message "Unknown user: username" is issued.

COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1997-2025 Marc Mengel. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR
Marc Mengel <mengel@fnal.gov>

REVISIONS

brian f foy <briandfoy@pobox.com> - v2.1 February 2025
    Reimplement this as a thin layer over File::Glob::csh_glob. This program was written before that was a core module, but had several edge cases where it would crash.

Brad Appleton <bradapp@enteract.com> - v1.2 March 1999
    Modified to use qr// (and some other minor speedups), to explode subexpressions in curly braces (a la csh -- rather than using just plain alternation), and made callable as a standalone script.