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Glob patterns w/ **; zero or more?

Subject: Glob patterns w/ **; zero or more?

## tl;dr

2 messages between Apr 16, 2023 and Apr 16, 2023.

replies: 1people: 2as markdown or json

Maël Nison· Apr 16, 2023, 18:40 UTC · lore
Hi,

I noticed that, in a repo with a single `main.c` file, `git ls-files './**/main.c'` (note the surrounding quotes, to avoid shell globbing) returns no result even though `git ls-files main.c` does. It however can find any `main.c` file located in a subdirectory, suggesting `**` is interpreted as "one or more" rather than "zero or more". Can you confirm it'd be a bug? I checked in both 2.38 and 2.40.

For reference, the documentation is explicit that `**` is "zero or more", not "one or more", and it matches the behaviour from other glob implementations (emphasis mine):

> A slash followed by two consecutive asterisks then a slash matches ***zero or
> more directories***. For example, "a/**/b" matches "a/b", "a/x/b", "a/x/y/b" and so on.
Also quoting the bash documentation for reference:
> globstar
> If set, the pattern ‘**’ used in a filename expansion context will match all files
> and zero or more directories and subdirectories. If the pattern is followed by
> a ‘/’, only directories and subdirectories match.
Andreas Schwab· Apr 16, 2023, 19:04 UTC · re: Maël Nison · lore

Re: Glob patterns w/ **; zero or more?

On Apr 16 2023, Maël Nison wrote:
Show 6 quoted lines
> I noticed that, in a repo with a single `main.c` file, `git ls-files
> './**/main.c'` (note the surrounding quotes, to avoid shell globbing)
> returns no result even though `git ls-files main.c` does. It however
> can find any `main.c` file located in a subdirectory, suggesting `**`
> is interpreted as "one or more" rather than "zero or more". Can you
> confirm it'd be a bug? I checked in both 2.38 and 2.40.

By default, pathspec matching does not take "**" specially, making it equivalen to "*", but it can match "/". Thus "./**/main.c" is the same as "*/main.c" (the leading "./" always matches) and matches paths with at least one "/" in it (thus "*/main.c" does not match "main.c").

If you use ":(glob)./**/main.c", it uses shell glob matching, where "**" is special and "/**/" can match "/", but "*" does not match "/".

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