Glob

Additional Language Notes

1. A glob is similar to a string, but it is expanded to match files using a pattern.

2. Globs are implemented using the nu_glob crate. The possible glob patterns are documented there.

3. When a command accepts a glob pattern directly:

   • It will interpret a bare-word (or backtick-quoted) string as a glob. This means:

     open *.txt    # opens all files which ends with `.txt`
     open `*.txt`  # it's backtick quoted, it's a bare word, so nu opens all files which ends with `.txt`

   • It will interpret other string types as a string literal. This means:

     open "*.txt"  # it's quoted, opens a file named `*.txt`
     open '*.txt'  # it's quoted, opens a file named `*.txt`

4. There is no literal syntax for a glob. As seen above, it is usually created as a string and then interpreted by the calling command as a glob.

   Example

   let s = "a*c.txt"         # a string type.
   open $s                   # opens a file literally named `a*c.txt`
   
   let g: glob = "a*c.txt"   # a glob type.
   open $g                   # opens files matching the glob pattern, e.g: `abc.txt`, `aac.txt`

5. These expansions also take place with custom commands:

   # open files which match a given glob pattern
   def open-files [g: glob] {
     open $g
     # In case if you want to open one file only
     # open ($g | into string)
   }
   
   # open one file
   def open-one-file [g: string] {
     open $g
     # In case if you want to open with glob pattern
     # open ($g | into glob)
   }
   
   # open one file
   def open-one-file2 [g] {
     open $g
   }

6. Glob expansion also takes place with external commands:

   # Concatenate files using cat and then split to a list of lines
   ^cat *.txt | lines

7. As with most other types, globs can be saved in a variable, passed to custom commands and returned from custom commands.

8. You can use into glob and into string to convert values between glob and string.

   let glob1: glob = "*"
   let glob2 = ("*" | into glob)
   
   # Both result in the same glob pattern
   $glob1 == $glob2
   # => true

9. Globs can also represent directory trees recursively using the ** pattern.

   For example, in Unix-like systems you might use a combination of the find and xargs commands to operate on directory trees:

   find -iname *.txt | xargs -I {} echo {} | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"

   In Nushell, it is more idiomatic to use this pattern:

   # Nostalgic for the Good Ole DOS days?
   ls **/*.txt | get name | str upcase

The glob command

The glob command provides additional globbing options. It is distinct from the glob type.

Simple example:

glob *.nu
# => [ /home/you/dev/foo.nu /home/you/dev/bar.nu ]

Notice the glob, after expansion, always returns a list of fully qualified pathnames.

Additional glob command options

For example, it can ignore directories using the -D flag:

glob -D * | path basename | str join ' '
foo.nu bar.nu
# => foo.nu bar.nu baz.nu

Common commands that can work with glob

• cp
• du
• ls
• glob
• mv
• rm