Re: Recursive globbing shorthand (a la **.c)

[ZyX <kp-pav@yandex.ru>]

28.10.2015, 16:28, "Mikael Magnusson" <mikachu@gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 7:57 AM, Dominik Vogt <vogt@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>>  Most of the time, I use recursive globbing to find files of
>>  certain types, e.g.
>>
>>    $ ll **/*.c
>>
>>  With the zsh here (4.3.17), recursive globbing works only
>>  with a plain ** anyway (i.e. in "**x" and "x**" the ** works just
>>  like a plain "*"). So, is it possible (or a useful future
>>  feature) to make "**" imply a trailing "/*" if not with a trailing
>>  pattern? Then we could type
>>
>>    $ ll **.c
>>
>>  as a shorthand, and the "traditional" uses would work without
>>  change (e.g. **/*.c or **/foo).
>>
>>  (Note that on German keyboards, "/" and "*" are very awkward to
>>  type in a sequence because both need the left shift key held and
>>  the keys for the right hand are very far apart, so this is really
>>  a usability issue.)
>
> If this is something you do often, you can do
> alias -g '**.c=**/*.c'
>
> I don't think it's useful to implement generally though, there's no
> particular reason to assume the pattern following the **/ should start
> with a *

This depends on how you treat patterns. In mercurial `**` is treated as `.*` and `*` is treated as `[^/]*`, so pattern `a**b` matches file `a/c/b` (note. With such interpretation transforming foo** into foo*/**, **bar into **/*bar and foo**bar into foo*/**/*bar makes perfect sense. Though mercurial is using regexps on a list of files, not the real globbing, this behaviour is official and not an accident: there are patterns like `**.c` in examples. As OP said this is convenient in many cases.

// And git documentation officially says that only valid uses of `**` are `…/**`, `**/…` and `…/**/…`.

>
> --
> Mikael Magnusson