ELGLOB(1)

📦 version 2.9.9.2, in nixpkgs unstable

🌸 elglob(1) — the globbing-then-exec glow-up ✨

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for elglob, from the General Commands Manual section — section 1, commands, iykyk 💅. sit down, grab a strawberry drink 🍓, and let me tell you about the little tool that globs first and execs second.

✨ NAME ✨

elglob — do a glob on a pattern, then run another program. that's it, that's the whole vibe 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

       prog...

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so elglob performs globbing[1] on pattern. yes, the same kind of globbing your shell does — the footnote link is right down there in SEE ALSO, no cap 🔥

then it does variable substitution (cf. execline-substitute(7)) on prog..., using variable as the key and the result of the globbing as the value. the way that works is: variable becomes the name, the glob matches become the value 💫

and the value is always split — it contains as many words as there are matches for the globbing pattern. always. no exceptions. it's giving "one word per match, periodt" 👑

after all that, elglob exec(3)s into the modified prog.... so like, it doesn't stick around, it becomes the program. main character energy fr fr ✨

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -v — Verbose. if something goes wrong while globbing, it prints a warning message on stderr. just a little heads-up, not a whole meltdown 🫶
  • -w — Strict. if something goes wrong while globbing, it dies immediately. and ngl the man page itself says this is harsh — you probably don't need that option 😭 like, it's a lot.
  • -s — Sort the matches. by default the results are left unsorted, so if you care about order, this is your girl 🌈
  • -m — Mark. appends a slash to each word that corresponds to a directory. cute little directory flag, iconic 🎀
  • -e — No escape. treats backslashes in pattern literally; does not allow quoting of metacharacters in pattern via backslashes. ⚠️ warning: the execlineb(1) launcher uses the backslash as their own escape character — so if you want a backslash to actually be passed to elglob, do not forget to double it. do not forget. i'm serious. double it 💀
  • -0 — Null globbing. by default, if pattern matches nothing, it gets substituted as-is (verbatim, in one word). with this option, if pattern matches nothing, it's properly substituted as zero words. zero. nothing. the void 🕳️
  • -n — Chomp. don't add an ending delimiter at the end of the word. only valid with the -d option, see below 👇
  • -d delim — Do not split the value. instead, make it one word, where the results of the globbing are separated by the first character of delim. if the -n option is not given, the first character of delim also appears after the last result. and if delim is the empty string, the values are encoded as a sequence of netstrings into a single word — and you can later separate the words with e.g. define -s (cf. define(1)). fancy, right? 🧚

🌸 SEE ALSO 🌸

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/glob.html

this man page is ported from the authoritative documentation at: https://skarnet.org/software/execline/elglob.html ⭐

👑 AUTHORS 👑

  • Laurent Bercot
  • Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com> (man page port)

and that's the whole page bestie, you ate 💖 this one shipped with Debian, dated June 8, 2024, and lives at the very bottom of ELGLOB(1) like a little footer bow 🎀 mwah, go glob something gorgeous 💜🦋

📦 where this page comes from