Thursday, January 27, 2011

Is it possible to craft a glob that matches files in the current directory and all subdirectoies?

For this directory structure:

.
|-- README.txt
|-- firstlevel.rb
`-- lib
    |-- models
    |   |-- foo
    |   |   `-- fourthlevel.rb
    |   `-- thirdlevel.rb
    `-- secondlevel.rb

3 directories, 5 files

The glob would match:

firstlevel.rb 
lib/secondlevel.rb 
lib/models/thirdlevel.rb
lib/models/foo/fourthlevel.rb
  • In Ruby itself:

    Dir.glob('**/*.rb') perhaps?
    
  • In zsh, **/*.rb works

  • Looks like it can't be done from bash

    If you using zsh then

    ls **/*.rb
    

    will produce the correct result.

    Otherwise you can hijack the ruby interpreter (and probably those of other languages)

    ruby -e "puts Dir.glob('**/*.rb')"
    

    Thanks to Chris and Gaius for your answers.

  • Apologies if I've missed the real point of the question but, if I was using sh/bash/etc., then I would probably use find to do the job:

    find . -name '*.rb' -type f
    

    Globs can get a bit nasty when used from within a script and find is much more flexible.

    From Nick

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