GLOB(1)

📦 version 1.053, in alpine 3.24

💖 GLOB(1) — the glob glow-up 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the glob manual page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation crew 🫶. This is the little command that does pathname matching, and yes, it’s giving iconic filename-expansion energy. Let’s get into it, no cap ✨.

✨ NAME ✨

glob — output pathnames matching a pattern 💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

On the command-line:

glob 'eenie{meenie,mynie,moe}*.[ch]'

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So back when this program was originally created, perl did not have a builtin glob feature and would rely on the csh to do the work for it 😭. Then with Perl v5.6 in March 2000, the File::Glob module has done that work without interacting with csh — slay for autonomy, honestly 👑.

🌸 Pattern Matching Syntax for Filename Expansion 🌸

The expressions you pass as arguments to glob must adhere to csh/tcsh pattern-matching syntax for wildcard filename expansion (also known as globbing) 🧚. Unquoted words containing an asterisk (*), question-mark (?), square-brackets ([...]), or curly-braces ({...}), or beginning with a tilde (~), are expanded into an alphabetically sorted list of filenames, as follows:

  • * — matches any (zero or more) characters 💫
  • ? — matches any single character 🎯
  • [...] — matches any single character in the given character class. The character class is the enclosed list(s) or range(s). A list is a string of characters. A range is two characters separated by a dash (-), and includes all the characters in between the two characters given (inclusive). If a dash (-) is intended to be part of the character class it must be the first character given 🔍
  • {str1,str2,...} — expands the given “word-set” to each string (or filename-matching pattern) in the comma-separated list. Unlike the pattern-matching expressions above, the expansion of this construct is not sorted. For instance, {foo,bar} expands to foo bar (not bar foo) 🙈. As special cases, unmatched { and }, and the “empty set” (the string {}) are treated as ordinary characters instead of pattern-matching meta-characters. A backslash (\) may be used to escape an opening or closing curly brace, or the backslash character itself. Note that word-sets may be nested! 🪆
  • ~ — the home directory of the invoking user as indicated by the value of the variable $HOME 🏠
  • ~username — the home directory of the user whose login name is 'username', as indicated by the password entry for the named user 🔑

Only the patterns *, ? and [...] imply pattern matching; an error results if no filename matches a pattern that contains them. When a period or “dot” (.) is the first character in a filename or pathname component, it must be matched explicitly. The filename component separator character (e.g., / or slash) must also be matched explicitly. Periodt. 💅

⚙️ OPTIONS ⚙️

  • -0 — when the first argument is -0 (a minus sign followed by the number zero), then a NUL character (\0) is used to separate the expanded words and/or filenames when printing them to standard output. Otherwise a newline is used as the word/filename output separator 🌙.

🔁 RETURNS 🔁

When glob is invoked as a script from the command-line, the exit-status returned will be 0 if any files were matched or word-sets were expanded; 1 if no files/word-sets were matched/expanded; and 2 if some other kind of error occurred. Track the vibe check by number, bestie 🔢.

🚨 DIAGNOSTICS 🚨

If no filenames are matched and pattern-matching characters were used (*, ?, or [...]), then an error message of No Match is issued 😭. If a user’s home directory is specified using tilde-expansion (e.g., ~username) but the corresponding username or their home directory cannot be found, then the error message Unknown user: username is issued 🙈.

Copyright (c) 1997-2025 Marc Mengel. All rights reserved. 🫶

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself 💖.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Marc Mengel <mengel@fnal.gov> ✨

🧾 REVISIONS 🧾

  • brian f foy <briandfoy@pobox.com> — v2.1 February 2025: Reimplement this as a thin layer over File::Glob::csh_glob. This program was written before that was a core module, but had several edge cases where it would crash 💀.
  • Brad Appleton <bradapp@enteract.com> — v1.2 March 1999: Modified to use qr// (and some other minor speedups), to explode subexpressions in curly braces (a la csh -- rather than using just plain alternation), and made callable as a standalone script 🌟.

💖 that’s the whole page, bestie — perl v5.42.2, dated 2026-02-15, signing off as GLOB(1) 💅✨

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