Before re-inventing the wheel, thought I should see if the wise monks have a solution:

Consider a program with a list of matching rules for files, say:

• * => action1
• *.txt => action2
• *.tx? => action7
• fred/* => action3
• fred/*.mac => action4
• george.txt => action5
• fred/george.txt => action6

Now, consider a find-like program that traverses a directory (or otherwise gets a list of candidate files) and applies each candidate file to the ruleset, selecting zero or 1 actions.

Clearly, the user would expect the selected action to be the most specific match - which seems like "the one satisfied by using the fewest/least powerful wildcards from the selected rule"

Algorithimicly, it might be something like:

• Match file to each fule; discard if no rules match.
• Accept if exactly one rule matches
• Otherwise, assign a score to each matching rule by counting the number of characters consumed by each wildcard. Accept the rule with the lowest score

Alternatively, the apache config file rules would work, except that in this case one wants only the final action to be applied.

I would have expected that this problem has been solved many times before, but haven't seen it in CPAN or elswhere. (I'm not wedded to the exact syntax used above.) Any pointers? Any solutions?

thanks

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