.\" (c) 1993 by Thomas Koenig (ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de) .\" .\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this .\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are .\" preserved on all copies. .\" .\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this .\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the .\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a .\" permission notice identical to this one. .\" .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no .\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from .\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not .\" have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual, .\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working .\" professionally. .\" .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. .\" License. .\" Modified Wed Jul 28 11:12:17 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) .\" Modified Mon May 13 23:08:50 1996 by Martin Schulze (joey@linux.de) .\" Modified 11 May 1998 by Joseph S. Myers (jsm28@cam.ac.uk) .\" Modified 990912 by aeb .\" .TH GLOB 3 1999-09-12 "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual" .SH NAME glob, globfree \- find pathnames matching a pattern, free memory from glob() .SH SYNOPSIS .nf .B #include .sp .BI "int glob(const char *" pattern ", int " flags , .nl .BI " int " errfunc "(const char *" epath ", int " eerrno ), .nl .BI " glob_t *" pglob ); .nl .BI "void globfree(glob_t *" pglob ); .fi .SH DESCRIPTION The .BR glob () function searches for all the pathnames matching .I pattern according to the rules used by the shell (see .BR glob (7)). No tilde expansion or parameter substitution is done; if you want these, use .BR wordexp (3). .PP The .BR globfree () function frees the dynamically allocated storage from an earlier call to .BR glob (). .PP The results of a .BR glob () call are stored in the structure pointed to by .IR pglob , which is a .B glob_t which is declared in .B and includes the following elements defined by POSIX.2 (more may be present as an extension): .PP .br .nf .in 10 typedef struct { .in 14 size_t gl_pathc; /* Count of paths matched so far */ char **gl_pathv; /* List of matched pathnames. */ size_t gl_offs; /* Slots to reserve in `gl_pathv'. */ .in 10 } glob_t; .fi .PP Results are stored in dynamically allocated storage. .PP The parameter .I flags is made up of bitwise OR of zero or more the following symbolic constants, which modify the of behaviour of .BR glob (): .TP .B GLOB_ERR which means to return upon read error (because a directory does not have read permission, for example), .TP .B GLOB_MARK which means to append a slash to each path which corresponds to a directory, .TP .B GLOB_NOSORT which means don't sort the returned pathnames (they are by default), .TP .B GLOB_DOOFFS which means that .I pglob->gl_offs slots will be reserved at the beginning of the list of strings in .IR pglob->pathv , .TP .B GLOB_NOCHECK which means that, if no pattern matches, to return the original pattern, .TP .B GLOB_APPEND which means to append to the results of a previous call. Do not set this flag on the first invocation of .BR glob (). .TP .B GLOB_NOESCAPE which means that meta characters cannot be quoted by backslashes. .PP The flags may also include some of the following, which are GNU extensions and not defined by POSIX.2: .TP .B GLOB_PERIOD which means that a leading period can be matched by meta characters, .TP .B GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC which means that alternative functions .IR pglob->gl_closedir , .IR pglob->gl_readdir , .IR pglob->gl_opendir , .IR pglob->gl_lstat ", and" .I pglob->gl_stat are used for file system access instead of the normal library functions, .TP .B GLOB_BRACE which means that .BR csh (1) style brace expressions \fB{a,b}\fR are expanded, .TP .B GLOB_NOMAGIC which means that the pattern is returned if it contains no metacharacters, .TP .B GLOB_TILDE which means that tilde expansion is carried out, and .TP .B GLOB_ONLYDIR which means that only directories are matched. .PP If .I errfunc is not NULL, it will be called in case of an error with the arguments .IR epath , a pointer to the path which failed, and .IR eerrno , the value of .I errno as returned from one of the calls to .BR opendir (), .BR readdir (), or .BR stat (). If .I errfunc returns non-zero, or if .B GLOB_ERR is set, .BR glob () will terminate after the call to .IR errfunc . .PP Upon successful return, .I pglob->gl_pathc contains the number of matched pathnames and .I pglob->gl_pathv a pointer to the list of matched pathnames. The first pointer after the last pathname is NULL. .PP It is possible to call .BR glob () several times. In that case, the .B GLOB_APPEND flag has to be set in .I flags on the second and later invocations. .PP As a GNU extension, .I pglob->gl_flags is set to the flags specified, \fBor\fRed with .B GLOB_MAGCHAR if any metacharacters were found. .SH "RETURN VALUE" On successful completion, .BR glob () returns zero. Other possible returns are: .TP .B GLOB_NOSPACE for running out of memory, .TP .B GLOB_ABORTED for a read error, and .TP .B GLOB_NOMATCH for no found matches. .SH EXAMPLES One example of use is the following code, which simulates typing .nl .B ls \-l *.c ../*.c .nl in the shell. .nf .in 10 glob_t globbuf; globbuf.gl_offs = 2; glob("*.c", GLOB_DOOFFS, NULL, &globbuf); glob("../*.c", GLOB_DOOFFS | GLOB_APPEND, NULL, &globbuf); globbuf.gl_pathv[0] = "ls"; globbuf.gl_pathv[1] = "\-l"; execvp("ls", &globbuf.gl_pathv[0]); .fi .SH "CONFORMING TO" POSIX.2 .SH BUGS The .BR glob () function may fail due to failure of underlying function calls, such as .BR malloc () or .BR opendir (). These will store their error code in .IR errno . .SH NOTES The structure elements .I gl_pathc and .I gl_offs are declared as .BR size_t in glibc 2.1, as they should according to POSIX.2, but are declared as .B int in libc4, libc5 and glibc 2.0. .SH "SEE ALSO" .BR ls (1), .BR sh (1), .BR stat (2), .BR exec (3), .BR fnmatch (3), .BR malloc (3), .BR opendir (3), .BR readdir (3), .BR wordexp (3), .BR glob (7)