[Caml-list] Wildcard expansion/command line Q#2

[Caml-list] Wildcard expansion/command line Q#2

[Jens Olsson]

Hi again,

as I dig more into the code of my program I realize that I have some more questions. I just hope these hasn't as obvious answers than my previous ones... :) 

Now, I know the shell expands any wildcard for my program, resulting in a argv array with all the expanded filenames in the given directory. Allright, nice and neat. I can deal with that. 

But what happens if I want to go recursive? As I understand it, the expansion made by the shell is *not* recursive itself. If my wildcard is *.txt I will only get expanded names for the current directory but not for any txt files in the subdirectories. Is this a desired behaviour?

I mean, one could interpret the wildcard *.txt as ./*.txt. In that case, maybe recursive action is not logical - as the complete path of the files in any subdirectories do not match the wildcard. If this is the case I find it locical and I only have to implement my program to deal with either one or more files given by the user directly or by shell expansion.

But if the wildcard *.txt together with a recurse flag means "all txt files in this and any subdirectory" I am a bit puzzled - what do I do with subdirectories? Do I have to open them manually and let the shell expand them too, using a globbing feature (if it works that way)? And if so, is this supported by Ocaml? I do not believe in this second alternative. It seems so awkward and so not in harmony with the idea of shell expansion of wildcards. But maybe I am missing something here?

I do not know if I make sense... but I guess that a little bit more examination of tools similar to the one I write might give some answers. Or maybe someone of you have it right away. I'd be more than happy to elaborate my thoughts if nescessary.

Jens
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Re: [Caml-list] Wildcard expansion/command line Q#2

[Alain Frisch]

On Tue, 14 May 2002, Jens Olsson wrote:

> as I dig more into the code of my program I realize that I have some
> more questions. I just hope these hasn't as obvious answers than my
> previous ones... :)
>
> Now, I know the shell expands any wildcard for my program, resulting in
> a argv array with all the expanded filenames in the given directory.
> Allright, nice and neat. I can deal with that.
>
> But what happens if I want to go recursive? As I understand it, the
> expansion made by the shell is *not* recursive itself. If my wildcard is
> *.txt I will only get expanded names for the current directory but not
> for any txt files in the subdirectories. Is this a desired behaviour?

This is a shell related question; for instance, under zsh, you can
use **/*.txt for recursive expansion.

-- Alain

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Re: [Caml-list] Wildcard expansion/command line Q#2

[John Prevost]

>>>>> "jo" == Jens Olsson <jenso@operamail.com> writes:

    jo> Hi again, as I dig more into the code of my program I realize
    jo> that I have some more questions. I just hope these hasn't as
    jo> obvious answers than my previous ones... :)

{...}

    jo> But what happens if I want to go recursive? As I understand
    jo> it, the expansion made by the shell is *not* recursive
    jo> itself. If my wildcard is *.txt I will only get expanded names
    jo> for the current directory but not for any txt files in the
    jo> subdirectories. Is this a desired behaviour?

This is another reason that this is external to programs.  The typical
solution is either to use a shell with a more extended syntax (zsh,
for example) which lets you write "**/foo" to mean "foo in all
subdirectories", or to use the program find possibly with the support
of xargs.  A typical example is:

find . -type f -name \*.deleteme -print0 | xargs -0 rm

If your program needs to do this work itself, it should implement its
own system of globbing, much like find does.

John.
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