Subject: Re: Glob patterns w/ **; zero or more?

From: Andreas Schwab <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2023 21:04:59 +0200

On Apr 16 2023, Maël Nison wrote:

> I noticed that, in a repo with a single `main.c` file, `git ls-files
> './**/main.c'` (note the surrounding quotes, to avoid shell globbing)
> returns no result even though `git ls-files main.c` does. It however
> can find any `main.c` file located in a subdirectory, suggesting `**`
> is interpreted as "one or more" rather than "zero or more". Can you
> confirm it'd be a bug? I checked in both 2.38 and 2.40.

By default, pathspec matching does not take "**" specially, making it
equivalen to "*", but it can match "/".  Thus "./**/main.c" is the same
as "*/main.c" (the leading "./" always matches) and matches paths with
at least one "/" in it (thus "*/main.c" does not match "main.c").

If you use ":(glob)./**/main.c", it uses shell glob matching, where "**"
is special and "/**/" can match "/", but "*" does not match "/".

-- 
Andreas Schwab, [email-masked]
GPG Key fingerprint = 7578 EB47 D4E5 4D69 2510  2552 DF73 E780 A9DA AEC1
"And now for something completely different."