What are the differences between glob-style patterns and regular expressions?

Traditional glob wildcards support a very narrow set of metacharacters — * is “anything”, ? is an arbitrary single character; Bourne shell also supports [a-z123] for a single character out of a set of alternatives, and [!x-z789] any one except those listed. Regex obviously is much richer, supporting repetitions, and (in ERE) alternation and specific … Read more

What reasons are there to prefer glob over readdir (or vice-versa) in Perl?

You missed the most important, biggest difference between them: glob gives you back a list, but opendir gives you a directory handle. You can pass that directory handle around to let other objects or subroutines use it. With the directory handle, the subroutine or object doesn’t have to know anything about where it came from, … Read more

When to use ** (double star) in glob syntax within JAVA

The javadoc for FileSystem#getPathMatcher() has some pretty good examples and explanations *.java Matches a path that represents a file name ending in .java *.* Matches file names containing a dot *.{java,class} Matches file names ending with .java or .class foo.? Matches file names starting with foo. and a single character extension /home/*/* Matches /home/gus/data on … Read more

grunt (minimatch/glob) folder exclusion

In the currently-in-development version 0.4.0a, the grunt.file.expand method now supports exclusions, and does so in an arguably less complex way than the underlying minimatch matching library. This is possible because grunt.file.expand accepts multiple patterns (whereas minimatch only accepts one). From the grunt.file.expand documentation: This method accepts either comma separated wildcard patterns or an array of … Read more