This section describes the standard flags that you can specify in the
flags argument to glob
. Choose the flags you want,
and combine them with the C bitwise OR operator |
.
Note that there are More Flags for Globbing available as GNU extensions.
GLOB_APPEND
¶Append the words from this expansion to the vector of words produced by
previous calls to glob
. This way you can effectively expand
several words as if they were concatenated with spaces between them.
In order for appending to work, you must not modify the contents of the
word vector structure between calls to glob
. And, if you set
GLOB_DOOFFS
in the first call to glob
, you must also
set it when you append to the results.
Note that the pointer stored in gl_pathv
may no longer be valid
after you call glob
the second time, because glob
might
have relocated the vector. So always fetch gl_pathv
from the
glob_t
structure after each glob
call; never save
the pointer across calls.
GLOB_DOOFFS
¶Leave blank slots at the beginning of the vector of words.
The gl_offs
field says how many slots to leave.
The blank slots contain null pointers.
GLOB_ERR
¶Give up right away and report an error if there is any difficulty
reading the directories that must be read in order to expand pattern
fully. Such difficulties might include a directory in which you don’t
have the requisite access. Normally, glob
tries its best to keep
on going despite any errors, reading whatever directories it can.
You can exercise even more control than this by specifying an
error-handler function errfunc when you call glob
. If
errfunc is not a null pointer, then glob
doesn’t give up
right away when it can’t read a directory; instead, it calls
errfunc with two arguments, like this:
(*errfunc) (filename, error-code)
The argument filename is the name of the directory that
glob
couldn’t open or couldn’t read, and error-code is the
errno
value that was reported to glob
.
If the error handler function returns nonzero, then glob
gives up
right away. Otherwise, it continues.
GLOB_MARK
¶If the pattern matches the name of a directory, append ‘/’ to the directory’s name when returning it.
GLOB_NOCHECK
¶If the pattern doesn’t match any file names, return the pattern itself
as if it were a file name that had been matched. (Normally, when the
pattern doesn’t match anything, glob
returns that there were no
matches.)
GLOB_NOESCAPE
¶Don’t treat the ‘\’ character specially in patterns. Normally, ‘\’ quotes the following character, turning off its special meaning (if any) so that it matches only itself. When quoting is enabled, the pattern ‘\?’ matches only the string ‘?’, because the question mark in the pattern acts like an ordinary character.
If you use GLOB_NOESCAPE
, then ‘\’ is an ordinary character.
glob
does its work by calling the function fnmatch
repeatedly. It handles the flag GLOB_NOESCAPE
by turning on the
FNM_NOESCAPE
flag in calls to fnmatch
.
GLOB_NOSORT
¶Don’t sort the file names; return them in no particular order. (In practice, the order will depend on the order of the entries in the directory.) The only reason not to sort is to save time.