7 definitions found for glob

glob n 1: a compact mass; "a ball of mud caught him on the shoulder" [syn: ball, clod, glob, lump, clump, chunk]

glob blog

glob
n. a mass or lump of semi-liquid substance, e.g. mud.
Etymology: 20th c.: perh. f. BLOB and GOB(1)

glob (globs) A glob of something soft or liquid is a small round amount of it. (INFORMAL) ...oily globs of soup. = blob N-COUNT: usu N of n

glob n. a mass or lump of semi-liquid substance, e.g. mud. [20th c.: perh. f. BLOB and GOB(1)]

glob /glob/, _not_ /glohb/ v.,n. [Unix; common] To expand special characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called `globbing'). The Unix conventions for filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers use some of them in written English, especially in email or news on technical topics. Those commonly encountered include the following: * wildcard for any string (see also UN*X) ? wildcard for any single character (generally read this way only at the beginning or in the middle of a word) [] delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed characters alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus, `foobaz,qux' would be read as `foobaz' or `fooqux' Some examples: "He said his name was [KC]arl" (expresses ambiguity). "I don't read talk.politics.*" (any of the talk.politics subgroups on Usenet). Other examples are given under the entry for X. Note that glob patterns are similar, but not identical, to those used in regexps. Historical note: The jargon usage derives from `glob', the name of a subprogram that expanded wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne versions of the Unix shell.

glob GLOB(7) Linux Programmer's Manual GLOB(7) NAME glob - Globbing pathnames DESCRIPTION Long ago, in Unix V6, there was a program /etc/glob that would expand wildcard patterns. Soon afterwards this became a shell built-in. These days there is also a library routine glob(3) that will perform this function for a user program. The rules are as follows (POSIX 1003.2, 3.13). WILDCARD MATCHING A string is a wildcard pattern if it contains one of the characters `?', `*' or `['. Globbing is the operation that expands a wildcard pat- tern into the list of pathnames matching the pattern. Matching is defined by: A `?' (not between brackets) matches any single character. A `*' (not between brackets) matches any string, including the empty string. Character classes An expression `[...]' where the first character after the leading `[' is not an `!' matches a single character, namely any of the characters enclosed by the brackets. The string enclosed by the brackets cannot be empty; therefore `]' can be allowed between the brackets, provided that it is the first character. (Thus, `[][!]' matches the three char- acters `[', `]' and `!'.) Ranges There is one special convention: two characters separated by `-' denote a range. (Thus, `[A-Fa-f0-9]' is equivalent to `[ABCDE- Fabcdef0123456789]'.) One may include `-' in its literal meaning by making it the first or last character between the brackets. (Thus, `[]-]' matches just the two characters `]' and `-', and `[--0]' matches the three characters `-', `.', `0', since `/' cannot be matched.) Complementation An expression `[!...]' matches a single character, namely any character that is not matched by the expression obtained by removing the first `!' from it. (Thus, `[!]a-]' matches any single character except `]', `a' and `-'.) One can remove the special meaning of `?', `*' and `[' by preceding them by a backslash, or, in case this is part of a shell command line, enclosing them in quotes. Between brackets these characters stand for themselves. Thus, `[[?*]' matches the four characters `[', `?', `*' and `'. PATHNAMES Globbing is applied on each of the components of a pathname separately. A `/' in a pathname cannot be matched by a `?' or `*' wildcard, or by a range like `[.-0]'. A range cannot contain an explicit `/' character; this would lead to a syntax error. If a filename starts with a `.', this character must be matched explicitly. (Thus, `rm *' will not remove .profile, and `tar c *' will not archive all your files; `tar c .' is better.) EMPTY LISTS The nice and simple rule given above: `expand a wildcard pattern into the list of matching pathnames' was the original Unix definition. It allowed one to have patterns that expand into an empty list, as in xv -wait 0 *.gif *.jpg where perhaps no *.gif files are present (and this is not an error). However, POSIX requires that a wildcard pattern is left unchanged when it is syntactically incorrect, or the list of matching pathnames is empty. With bash one can force the classical behaviour by setting allow_null_glob_expansion=true. (Similar problems occur elsewhere. E.g., where old scripts have rm `find . -name "*~"` new scripts require rm -f nosuchfile `find . -name "*~"` to avoid error messages from rm called with an empty argument list.) NOTES Regular expressions Note that wildcard patterns are not regular expressions, although they are a bit similar. First of all, they match filenames, rather than text, and secondly, the conventions are not the same: e.g., in a regu- lar expression `*' means zero or more copies of the preceding thing. Now that regular expressions have bracket expressions where the nega- tion is indicated by a `^', POSIX has declared the effect of a wildcard pattern `[^...]' to be undefined. Character classes and Internationalization Of course ranges were originally meant to be ASCII ranges, so that `[ -%]' stands for `[ !"#$%]' and `[a-z]' stands for "any lowercase let- ter". Some Unix implementations generalized this so that a range X-Y stands for the set of characters with code between the codes for X and for Y. However, this requires the user to know the character coding in use on the local system, and moreover, is not convenient if the collat- ing sequence for the local alphabet differs from the ordering of the character codes. Therefore, POSIX extended the bracket notation greatly, both for wildcard patterns and for regular expressions. In the above we saw three types of items that can occur in a bracket expression: namely (i) the negation, (ii) explicit single characters, and (iii) ranges. POSIX specifies ranges in an internationally more useful way and adds three more types: (iii) Ranges X-Y comprise all characters that fall between X and Y (inclusive) in the currect collating sequence as defined by the LC_COL- LATE category in the current locale. (iv) Named character classes, like [:alnum:] [:alpha:] [:blank:] [:cntrl:] [:digit:] [:graph:] [:lower:] [:print:] [:punct:] [:space:] [:upper:] [:xdigit:] so that one can say `[[:lower:]]' instead of `[a-z]', and have things work in Denmark, too, where there are three letters past `z' in the alphabet. These character classes are defined by the LC_CTYPE category in the current locale. (v) Collating symbols, like `[.ch.]' or `[.a-acute.]', where the string between `[.' and `.]' is a collating element defined for the current locale. Note that this may be a multi-character element. (vi) Equivalence class expressions, like `[=a=]', where the string between `[=' and `=]' is any collating element from its equivalence class, as defined for the current locale. For example, `[[=a=]]' might be equivalent to `[a]' (warning: Latin-1 here), that is, to `[a[.a- acute.][.a-grave.][.a-umlaut.][.a-circumflex.]]'. SEE ALSO sh(1), fnmatch(3), glob(3), locale(7), regex(7) Unix 2003-08-24 GLOB(7)