glob \glob\ n.
1. a compact mass, especially of a semiliquid or viscous
substance; as, a glob of glue fell on my shoe.
Syn: ball, clod, lump, clump, chunk.
[WordNet 1.5 +PJC]
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glob
/glob/, not, /glohb/, v.,n.
[Unix; common] To expand special characters in a wildcarded name, or the
act of so doing (the action is also called globbing). The Unix conventions
for filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive that many
hackers use some of them in written English, especially in email or news on
technical topics. Those commonly encountered include the following:
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|* |wildcard for any string (see also UN*X) |
|--+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|? |wildcard for any single character (generally read this way only at the|
| |beginning or in the middle of a word) |
|--+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|[]|delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed characters |
|--+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|{}|alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus, ?foobaz,qux? |
| |would be read as ?foobaz? or ?fooqux? |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Some examples: ?He said his name was [KC]arl? (expresses ambiguity). ?I
don't read talk.politics.*? (any of the talk.politics subgroups on Usenet
). Other examples are given under the entry for X. Note that glob
patterns are similar, but not identical, to those used in regexps.
Historical note: The jargon usage derives from glob, the name of a
subprogram that expanded wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne versions of the
Unix shell.
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glob
/glob/ A mechanism that returns a list
of pathnames that match a pattern containing wild card
characters. Globbing was available in early versions of Unix
and, in more limited form, in Microsoft Windows.
The characters are:
* = zero or more characters, e.g. "probab*" would match
probabilistic, probabilistically, probabilities, probability,
probable, probably.
? = any single character, e.g. "b?g" would match bag, big, bog,
bug.
[] any of the enclosed characters, e.g. "b[ao]g" would match bag,
bog (not on Windows).
These have become sufficiently pervasive that hackers use them in
written messages. E.g. "He said his name was [KC]arl" (expresses
ambiguity). "I don't read talk.politics.*" (any of the
talk.politics subgroups on Usenet). Other examples are given
under the entry for X.
Later Unix shells introduced the x,y,z syntax which expands to a
comma-separated list of alternatives, thus foobaz,qux would
expand to "foobaz" and "fooqux". This differs from a glob because
it generates a list of all possible expansions, rather than
matching against existing files.
Glob patterns are similar, but not identical, to regular
expressions.
"glob" was a subprogram that expanded wild cards in archaic
pre-Bourne versions of the Unix shell. It is also a
bulit-in function in Perl.
(2014-08-22)
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