Re: a glob w/ no wildcards returns itself

While you can certainly argue for (or against) any of the different globbing behaviors - ranging from "the shell"'s (interpret wildcards literally, if no match in the file system) to Python's (always test for existence) - ultimately, it's a matter of preference.

Personally, I find Perl's mixed behavior rather "do-what-I-mean". I.e., when I specify a ? or * wildcard, I'm typically interested in what matching files there are in the file system, while if I use a "limited set" wildcard like {a,b,c}, I can compactly compute permutations with it, e.g.

$ perl -le 'print for glob "{foo,bar}{baz,quux}"'
foobaz
fooquux
barbaz
barquux
[download]

which Python doesn't do because of its consistent behavior. IOW, consistent isn't always the most practically useful... :)

And, as for the shell, I always found its behavior to treat a "*" literally (in case nothing matches) a little counter-intuitive... (if I really mean a literal "*", I can always escape it in Perl).

Anyhow, YMMV.

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Re^2: a glob w/ no wildcards returns itself by jeberle (Initiate) on Aug 23, 2011 at 19:32 UTC
Thank you Eliya. The use case I have is to do actual file matching, where the user specifies the pattern. For this, the behavior is counter-productive. Therefore: `$ perl -le 'print grep { -f } glob "foo.c"'` [download] will have to rule the day. In bash you can do: `$ shopt -s nullglob $ echo foo.?` [download] but then `ls` generates full dir listings on failed globs.	[reply] [d/l] [select]