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GLOB(3) Linux Programmer's Manual GLOB(3)
glob, globfree - find pathnames matching a pattern, free memory from glob()
#include <glob.h>
int glob(const char *pattern, int flags,
int (*errfunc) (const char *epath, int eerrno),
glob_t *pglob);
void globfree(glob_t *pglob);
The glob() function searches for all the pathnames matching pattern according
to the rules used by the shell (see glob(7)). No tilde expansion or parameter
substitution is done; if you want these, use wordexp(3).
The globfree() function frees the dynamically allocated storage from an
earlier call to glob().
The results of a glob() call are stored in the structure pointed to by pglob.
This structure is of type glob_t (declared in <glob.h>) and includes the
following elements defined by POSIX.2 (more may be present as an extension):
typedef struct {
size_t gl_pathc; /* Count of paths matched so far */
char **gl_pathv; /* List of matched pathnames. */
size_t gl_offs; /* Slots to reserve in gl_pathv. */
} glob_t;
Results are stored in dynamically allocated storage.
The argument flags is made up of the bitwise OR of zero or more the following
symbolic constants, which modify the behavior of glob():
GLOB_ERR
Return upon a read error (because a directory does not have read
permission, for example). By default, glob() attempts carry on despite
errors, reading all of the directories that it can.
GLOB_MARK
Append a slash to each path which corresponds to a directory.
GLOB_NOSORT
Don't sort the returned pathnames. The only reason to do this is to
save processing time. By default, the returned pathnames are sorted.
GLOB_DOOFFS
Reserve pglob->gl_offs slots at the beginning of the list of strings in
pglob->pathv. The reserved slots contain NULL pointers.
GLOB_NOCHECK
If no pattern matches, return the original pattern. By default, glob()
returns GLOB_NOMATCH if there are no matches.
GLOB_APPEND
Append the results of this call to the vector of results returned by a
previous call to glob(). Do not set this flag on the first invocation
of glob().
GLOB_NOESCAPE
Don't allow backslash ('\') to be used as an escape character.
Normally, a backslash can be used to quote the following character,
providing a mechanism to turn off the special meaning metacharacters.
flags may also include any of the following, which are GNU extensions and not
defined by POSIX.2:
GLOB_PERIOD
Allow a leading period to be matched by metacharacters. By default,
metacharacters can't match a leading period.
GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC
Use alternative functions pglob->gl_closedir, pglob->gl_readdir,
pglob->gl_opendir, pglob->gl_lstat, and pglob->gl_stat for file system
access instead of the normal library functions.
GLOB_BRACE
Expand csh(1) style brace expressions of the form {a,b}. Brace
expressions can be nested. Thus, for example, specifying the pattern
"{foo/{,cat,dog},bar}" would return the same results as four separate
glob() calls using the strings: "foo/", "foo/cat", "foo/dog", and
"bar".
GLOB_NOMAGIC
If the pattern contains no metacharacters then it should be returned as
the sole matching word, even if there is no file with that name.
GLOB_TILDE
Carry out tilde expansion. If a tilde ('~') is the only character in
the pattern, or an initial tilde is followed immediately by a slash
('/'), then the home directory of the caller is substituted for the
tilde. If an initial tilde is followed by a username (e.g.,
"~andrea/bin"), then the tilde and username are substituted by the home
directory of that user. If the username is invalid, or the home
directory cannot be determined, then no substitution is performed.
GLOB_TILDE_CHECK
This provides behavior similar to that of GLOB_TILDE. The difference
is that if the username is invalid, or the home directory cannot be
determined, then instead of using the pattern itself as the name,
glob() returns GLOB_NOMATCH to indicate an error.
GLOB_ONLYDIR
This is a hint to glob() that the caller is interested only in
directories that match the pattern. If the implementation can easily
determine file-type information, then nondirectory files are not
returned to the caller. However, the caller must still check that
returned files are directories. (The purpose of this flag is merely to
optimize performance when the caller is interested only in
directories.)
If errfunc is not NULL, it will be called in case of an error with the
arguments epath, a pointer to the path which failed, and eerrno, the value of
errno as returned from one of the calls to opendir(3), readdir(3), or stat(2).
If errfunc returns nonzero, or if GLOB_ERR is set, glob() will terminate after
the call to errfunc.
Upon successful return, pglob->gl_pathc contains the number of matched
pathnames and pglob->gl_pathv contains a pointer to the list of pointers to
matched pathnames. The list of pointers is terminated by a NULL pointer.
It is possible to call glob() several times. In that case, the GLOB_APPEND
flag has to be set in flags on the second and later invocations.
As a GNU extension, pglob->gl_flags is set to the flags specified, ored with
GLOB_MAGCHAR if any metacharacters were found.
On successful completion, glob() returns zero. Other possible returns are:
GLOB_NOSPACE
for running out of memory,
GLOB_ABORTED
for a read error, and
GLOB_NOMATCH
for no found matches.
POSIX.2, POSIX.1-2001.
The structure elements gl_pathc and gl_offs are declared as size_t in glibc
2.1, as they should be according to POSIX.2, but are declared as int in libc4,
libc5 and glibc 2.0.
The glob() function may fail due to failure of underlying function calls, such
as malloc(3) or opendir(3). These will store their error code in errno.
One example of use is the following code, which simulates typing
ls -l *.c ../*.c
in the shell:
glob_t globbuf;
globbuf.gl_offs = 2;
glob("*.c", GLOB_DOOFFS, NULL, &globbuf);
glob("../*.c", GLOB_DOOFFS | GLOB_APPEND, NULL, &globbuf);
globbuf.gl_pathv[0] = "ls";
globbuf.gl_pathv[1] = "-l";
execvp("ls", &globbuf.gl_pathv[0]);
ls(1), sh(1), stat(2), exec(3), fnmatch(3), malloc(3), opendir(3), readdir(3),
wordexp(3), glob(7)
This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
GNU 2007-10-10 GLOB(3)
HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface