This command performs file name “globbing” in a fashion similar to the csh shell. It returns a list of the files whose names match any of the pattern arguments. No particular order is guaranteed in the list, so if a sorted list is required the caller should use lsort.
If the initial arguments to glob start with - then they are treated as switches. The following switches are currently supported:
The second form specifies types where all the types given must match. These are r, w, x as file permissions, and readonly, hidden as special permission cases. On the Macintosh, MacOS types and creators are also supported, where any item which is four characters long is assumed to be a MacOS type (e.g. TEXT). Items which are of the form {macintosh type XXXX} or {macintosh creator XXXX} will match types or creators respectively. Unrecognized types, or specifications of multiple MacOS types/creators will signal an error.
The two forms may be mixed, so -types {d f r w} will find all regular files OR directories that have both read AND write permissions. The following are equivalent:
glob -type d * glob */
The pattern arguments may contain any of the following special characters:
On Unix, as with csh, a “.” at the beginning of a file's name or just after a “/” must be matched explicitly or with a {} construct, unless the -types hidden flag is given (since “.” at the beginning of a file's name indicates that it is hidden). On other platforms, files beginning with a “.” are handled no differently to any others, except the special directories “.” and “..” which must be matched explicitly (this is to avoid a recursive pattern like “glob -join * * * *” from recursing up the directory hierarchy as well as down). In addition, all “/” characters must be matched explicitly.
If the first character in a pattern is “~” then it refers to the home directory for the user whose name follows the “~” If the “~” is followed immediately by “/” then the value of the HOME environment variable is used.
The glob command differs from csh globbing in two ways. First, it does not sort its result list (use the lsort command if you want the list sorted). Second, glob only returns the names of files that actually exist; in csh no check for existence is made unless a pattern contains a ?, *, or [] construct.
When the glob command returns relative paths whose filenames start with a tilde “~” (for example through glob * or glob -tails, the returned list will not quote the tilde with “./” This means care must be taken if those names are later to be used with file join, to avoid them being interpreted as absolute paths pointing to a given user's home directory.
Windows . For Windows UNC names, the servername and sharename components of the path may not contain ?, *, or [] constructs. On Windows NT, if pattern is of the form “~username@domain” it refers to the home directory of the user whose account information resides on the specified NT domain server. Otherwise, user account information is obtained from the local computer. On Windows 95 and 98, glob accepts patterns like “.../” and “..../” for successively higher up parent directories.
Since the backslash character has a special meaning to the glob command, glob patterns containing Windows style path separators need special care. The pattern C:\\foo\\* is interpreted as C:\foo\* where \f will match the single character f and \* will match the single character * and will not be interpreted as a wildcard character. One solution to this problem is to use the Unix style forward slash as a path separator. Windows style paths can be converted to Unix style paths with the command file join $path (or file normalize $path in Tcl 8.4).
glob *.tcl
Find all the Tcl files in the user's home directory, irrespective of what the current directory is:
glob -directory ~ *.tcl
Find all subdirectories of the current directory:
glob -type d *
Find all files whose name contains an “a” a “b” or the sequence “cde”
glob -type f *{a,b,cde}*