GLOB (3) | C library functions | Unix Manual Pages

Alphabetical Categories About us

GLOB (3) | C library functions | Unix Manual Pages | :man▋

The include file
.In glob.h defines the structure type glob_t, which contains at least the following fields:
typedef struct {
int gl_pathc; /* count of total paths so far */
int gl_matchc;/* count of paths matching pattern */
int gl_offs; /* reserved at beginning of gl_pathv */
int gl_flags; /* returned flags */
char **gl_pathv; /* list of paths matching pattern */
} glob_t;

The argument pattern is a pointer to a pathname pattern to be expanded. The glob argument matches all accessible pathnames against the pattern and creates a list of the pathnames that match. In order to have access to a pathname, glob requires search permission on every component of a path except the last and read permission on each directory of any filename component of pattern that contains any of the special characters ‘*’, ‘?’ or ‘[’.

The glob argument stores the number of matched pathnames into the gl_pathc field, and a pointer to a list of pointers to pathnames into the gl_pathv field. The first pointer after the last pathname is NULL. If the pattern does not match any pathnames, the returned number of matched paths is set to zero.

It is the caller’s responsibility to create the structure pointed to by pglob. The glob function allocates other space as needed, including the memory pointed to by gl_pathv.

The argument flags is used to modify the behavior of glob. The value of flags is the bitwise inclusive OR of any of the following values defined in
.In glob.h :

`GLOB_APPEND`	Append pathnames generated to the ones from a previous call (or calls) to `glob`. The value of gl_pathc will be the total matches found by this call and the previous call(s). The pathnames are appended to, not merged with the pathnames returned by the previous call(s). Between calls, the caller must not change the setting of the `GLOB_DOOFFS` flag, nor change the value of gl_offs when `GLOB_DOOFFS` is set, nor (obviously) call `globfree` for pglob.
`GLOB_DOOFFS`	Make use of the gl_offs field. If this flag is set, gl_offs is used to specify how many `NULL` pointers to prepend to the beginning of the gl_pathv field. In other words, gl_pathv will point to gl_offs `NULL` pointers, followed by gl_pathc pathname pointers, followed by a `NULL` pointer.
`GLOB_ERR`	Causes `glob` to return when it encounters a directory that it cannot open or read. Ordinarily, `glob` continues to find matches.
`GLOB_MARK`	Each pathname that is a directory that matches pattern has a slash appended.
`GLOB_NOCHECK`	If pattern does not match any pathname, then `glob` returns a list consisting of only pattern, with the number of total pathnames set to 1, and the number of matched pathnames set to 0. The effect of backslash escaping is present in the pattern returned.
`GLOB_NOESCAPE`	By default, a backslash (‘`\`’) character is used to escape the following character in the pattern, avoiding any special interpretation of the character. If `GLOB_NOESCAPE` is set, backslash escaping is disabled.
`GLOB_NOSORT`	By default, the pathnames are sorted in ascending ASCII order; this flag prevents that sorting (speeding up `glob`).

The following values may also be included in flags, however, they are non-standard extensions to -p1003.2.

`GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC`
	The following additional fields in the pglob structure have been initialized with alternate functions for glob to use to open, read, and close directories and to get stat information on names found in those directories. void (gl_opendir)(const char * name); struct dirent (gl_readdir)(void ); void (gl_closedir)(void ); int (gl_lstat)(const char name, struct stat st); int (gl_stat)(const char name, struct stat st); This extension is provided to allow programs such as restore*(8) to provide globbing from directories stored on tape.
`GLOB_BRACE`	Pre-process the pattern string to expand ‘`{pat,pat,...}`’ strings like csh(1). The pattern ‘`{}`’ is left unexpanded for historical reasons (and csh(1) does the same thing to ease typing of find(1) patterns).
`GLOB_MAGCHAR`	Set by the `glob` function if the pattern included globbing characters. See the description of the usage of the gl_matchc structure member for more details.
`GLOB_NOMAGIC`	Is the same as `GLOB_NOCHECK` but it only appends the pattern if it does not contain any of the special characters ‘‘’’, ‘‘?’’ or ‘‘[’’. `GLOB_NOMAGIC` is provided to simplify implementing the historic csh*(1) globbing behavior and should probably not be used anywhere else.
`GLOB_TILDE`	Expand patterns that start with ‘`~`’ to user name home directories.
`GLOB_LIMIT`	Limit the total number of returned pathnames to the value provided in gl_matchc (default `ARG_MAX`). This option should be set for programs that can be coerced into a denial of service attack via patterns that expand to a very large number of matches, such as a long string of ‘`/..//..`’.

If, during the search, a directory is encountered that cannot be opened or read and errfunc is non- NULL, glob calls *errfunc( path, errno). This may be unintuitive: a pattern like ‘*/Makefile’ will try to stat(2) ‘foo/Makefile’ even if ‘foo’ is not a directory, resulting in a call to errfunc. The error routine can suppress this action by testing for ENOENT and ENOTDIR; however, the GLOB_ERR flag will still cause an immediate return when this happens.

If errfunc returns non-zero, glob stops the scan and returns GLOB_ABORTED after setting gl_pathc and gl_pathv to reflect any paths already matched. This also happens if an error is encountered and GLOB_ERR is set in flags, regardless of the return value of errfunc, if called. If GLOB_ERR is not set and either errfunc is NULL or errfunc returns zero, the error is ignored.

The globfree function frees any space associated with pglob from a previous call(s) to glob.

RETURN VALUES

On successful completion, glob returns zero. In addition the fields of pglob contain the values described below:

gl_pathc	contains the total number of matched pathnames so far. This includes other matches from previous invocations of `glob` if `GLOB_APPEND` was specified.
gl_matchc	contains the number of matched pathnames in the current invocation of `glob`.
gl_flags	contains a copy of the flags argument with the bit `GLOB_MAGCHAR` set if pattern contained any of the special characters ‘‘*’’, ‘‘?’’ or ‘‘[’’, cleared if not.
gl_pathv	contains a pointer to a `NULL -terminated` list of matched pathnames. However, if gl_pathc is zero, the contents of gl_pathv are undefined.

If glob terminates due to an error, it sets errno and returns one of the following non-zero constants, which are defined in the include file
.In glob.h :

`GLOB_NOSPACE`
	An attempt to allocate memory failed, or if errno was 0 `GLOB_LIMIT` was specified in the flags and pglob->gl_matchc or more patterns were matched.
`GLOB_ABORTED`
	The scan was stopped because an error was encountered and either `GLOB_ERR` was set or *errfunc returned non-zero.
`GLOB_NOMATCH`
	The pattern did not match a pathname and `GLOB_NOCHECK` was not set.