NAME
glob, globfree - find pathnames matching a pattern, free memory from glob() SYNOPSIS
#include
int glob(const char *pattern, int flags, int (*errfunc) (const char *epath, int eerrno), globt *pglob); void globfree(globt *pglob); DESCRIPTION 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 globt (declared in ) and includes the following elements defined by POSIX.2 (more may be present as an extension): typedef struct { sizet glpathc; /* Count of paths matched so far */ char **glpathv; /* List of matched pathnames. */ sizet gloffs; /* Slots to reserve in glpathv. */ } globt; 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(): GLOBERR 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. GLOBMARK Append a slash to each path which corresponds to a directory. GLOBNOSORT Don't sort the returned pathnames. The only reason to do this is to save processing time. By default, the returned pathnames are sorted. GLOBDOOFFS Reserve pglob->gloffs slots at the beginning of the list of
strings in pglob->pathv. The reserved slots contain NULL point‐ ers. GLOBNOCHECK If no pattern matches, return the original pattern. By default, glob() returns GLOBNOMATCH if there are no matches. GLOBAPPEND 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(). GLOBNOESCAPE Don't allow backslash ('\') to be used as an escape character. Normally, a backslash can be used to quote the following charac‐ ter, 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: GLOBPERIOD Allow a leading period to be matched by metacharacters. By default, metacharacters can't match a leading period. GLOBALTDIRFUNC
Use alternative functions pglob->glclosedir, pglob->glreaddir,
pglob->glopendir, pglob->gllstat, and pglob->glstat for file system access instead of the normal library functions. GLOBBRACE 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". GLOBNOMAGIC 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. GLOBTILDE Carry out tilde expansion. If a tilde ('~') is the only charac‐ ter in the pattern, or an initial tilde is followed immediately by a slash ('/'), then the home directory of the caller is sub‐ stituted 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. GLOBTILDECHECK This provides behavior similar to that of GLOBTILDE. The dif‐ ference is that if the username is invalid, or the home direc‐ tory cannot be determined, then instead of using the pattern itself as the name, glob() returns GLOBNOMATCH to indicate an error. GLOBONLYDIR 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 inter‐ ested 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), read‐ dir(3), or stat(2). If errfunc returns nonzero, or if GLOBERR is set, glob() will terminate after the call to errfunc.
Upon successful return, pglob->glpathc contains the number of matched
pathnames and pglob->glpathv contains a pointer to the list of point‐ ers 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 GLOBAPPEND flag has to be set in flags on the second and later invoca‐ tions.
As a GNU extension, pglob->glflags is set to the flags specified, ored with GLOBMAGCHAR if any metacharacters were found. RETURN VALUE On successful completion, glob() returns zero. Other possible returns are: GLOBNOSPACE for running out of memory, GLOBABORTED for a read error, and GLOBNOMATCH for no found matches. CONFORMING TO
POSIX.2, POSIX.1-2001. NOTES The structure elements glpathc and gloffs are declared as sizet in glibc 2.1, as they should be according to POSIX.2, but are declared as int in libc4, libc5 and glibc 2.0. BUGS 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. EXAMPLE One example of use is the following code, which simulates typing
ls -l *.c ../*.c in the shell: globt globbuf; globbuf.gloffs = 2; glob("*.c", GLOBDOOFFS, NULL, &globbuf); glob("../*.c", GLOBDOOFFS | GLOBAPPEND, NULL, &globbuf); globbuf.glpathv[0] = "ls";
globbuf.glpathv[1] = "-l"; execvp("ls", &globbuf.glpathv[0]); SEE ALSO ls(1), sh(1), stat(2), exec(3), fnmatch(3), malloc(3), opendir(3), readdir(3), wordexp(3), glob(7) COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.53 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)