Bash – Configure bash globbing

bashwildcards

After coming from cygwin, I'm quite confused about the bash (version 4.1.5) globbing on my Ubuntu 10.4. I'd love one of the following two possibilities:

ignore . and .., match everything else
ignore filenames starting with a dot unless given explicitly

The current behavior is plain strange:

cd; ls .*

says "ls: cannot access .*: No such file or directory" although I explicitly asked for filenames starting with a dot.

cd; ls .gnupg/*.gpg

complains as well although I'm asking for files not starting with a dot (it's just the directory name what starts with a dot).

Output of `shopt -p`

(removed)

The solution

I've changed shopt to values from another user (not having this problem) and it didn't help. Then I came to the idea to bisect my .bashrc and find the offending line which contained something like GLOBIGNORE='.[!/.]*:..[!/]*:*/.[!/.]*:*/..[!/]*:…

I've replaced it by GLOBIGNORE='.:..', which does nearly what I want, and it works.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, I must answer my own question. It was GLOBIGNORE. From the man page:

A colon-separated list of patterns defining the set of filenames to be ignored by pathname expansion. If a filename matched by a pathname expansion pattern also matches one of the patterns in GLOBIGNORE, it is removed from the list of matches.

Related Solutions

Bash globbing of multi-part argument

The -false idea is the key, IMHO. I'm just adding to it:

find . -false $(echo "-o -name *."{sh,pl,sql})

You just quote everything to make bash repeat the whole pattern, including -o -name, and then "break" the grouping made by the quoting by returning it from a subshell. The problem with this approach is that quotes in the pattern won't work.

EDIT: See Michał Šrajer's comment for another pitfall of this solution. Note that you can't just put a backslash before the star: the command substitution returns either a *, which will get expanded, or a \*, which will get passed as-is to find (!). At least, that's how my local bash works.

This is the best I can do:

 (GLOBIGNORE='*:.*'; find . \( -false $(echo "-o -name *."{sh,pl,sql,xml}) \) -print)

Good luck :)

Btw, if you are not going to add more parameters to find, of course just use xargs; in that case it works perfectly, with quotes and everything:

echo "-o -name *."{sh,pl,sql} | xargs find . -false

Bash globbing hidden files

You are mistaken. It means "a dot followed by exactly one non-dot followed by one character followed by zero or more characters". .a does not have enough characters to match it.

But really, just set dotglob.

Output of shopt -p