9 Jul
2017
9 Jul
'17
6:26 p.m.
Glob was an an accident. When Ken and Dennis wanted to put wildcards
(an anachronistic word--it wasn't used in the Unix lab at the time)
into the shell, there wasn't room, so they came up with the clever hack
of calling another process to do the work.
I have always understood that glob meant global because commands like
rm *
would be applied to every file in a directory. A relationship to ed's
g command was clear, but not primary in my mind.
One curious fact is that from day one the word hase been pronounced glob,
not globe. (By contrast, creat has been variously pronounced cree-at
and create.) It is also interesting to speculate on whether there would
be a glob library routine in Linux had glob only been an identifier in
sh.c rather than an entry in /bin.
I believe the simple * was borrowed from somewhere else. If the g command
had been the driving model, glob would probably have had ? and ?*, not
? and *. (It couldn't use ed's . because . was ubiquitous in file names.)
My etymology is somewhat different from Steve's. But I never asked the
originator(s). Steve, did you?
Doug
9 Jul
9 Jul
7:12 p.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
TOPS-10 came out as "MONITOR" in 1967, and while I'm not sure it started
out with * and ?, it definitely had it early on.
Not saying TOPS-10 was the originator of *, but it was certainly around
in at least one other operating system.
On 7/9/2017 8:26 AM, Doug McIlroy wrote:
I believe the simple * was borrowed from somewhere
else. If the g command
had been the driving model, glob would probably have had ? and ?*, not
? and *. (It couldn't use ed's . because . was ubiquitous in file names.)
10 Jul
10 Jul
3:29 a.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
On Sun, 9 Jul 2017, Arthur Krewat wrote:
TOPS-10 came out as "MONITOR" in 1967, and
while I'm not sure it started
out with * and ?, it definitely had it early on.
Not saying TOPS-10 was the originator of *, but it was certainly around
in at least one other operating system.
I vaguely remember something like "PIP *.TXT *.OLD" to rename files (the
"*" was interpreted by the command itself, not the interpreter).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
3:44 a.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 2:29 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
I vaguely remember something like "PIP *.TXT *.OLD" to rename files (the
"*" was interpreted by the command itself, not the interpreter).
All the DEC-10 and 11 operating systems I used had that wildcard, as well
as IIRC even the PDP-8, maybe someone can confirm the -8.
It would have been nice had RE's been the standard way to glob files, but,
that said, when I mention .*\.c to people instead of *.c they don't much
like it.
ron
6:31 a.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
It would have been nice had RE's been the standard
way to glob
files, but, that said, when I mention .*\.c to people instead of
*.c they don't much like it.
Regular expressions are more powerful than glob, but much
harder to use correctly. People who have not had exposure
to them get them wrong all the time. The most common mistakes,
in my experience, are or include:
- Forgetting to quote ".": "pat.h" accidentally matches
file "patch"! This should read "pat\.h" (but see next
point).
- Forgetting to anchor expressions on left and/or right:
"x\.c" matches "x.cc". This should read "x\.c$" (or
even
"^x\.c$" or perhaps ".*/x\.c$").
(It's also sometimes difficult to know whether your expression
will be given the full -- in which case, relative or absolute? --
path, or just a single pathname component.)
Mercurial allows both regexp and glob matches in .hgignore files
(and other places), while Git allows only globs. Moreover, this
is the *default* in Mercurial. Both are a bit surprising since
Git usually goes straight for the hard-to-use, fully-general case
instead of introducing users with the easy case, while Mercurial
is pretty good about starting off gently and only then getting you
into the deeper complexities if required.
(Mercurial used to execute regexps much faster than globs, as
well, so Kurt Lidl was always transforming my simple glob matches
to regexps. We both got them wrong sometimes, although I like to
think I got them right more often. I *think* the performance
issues are long since fixed, but I use Mercurial much less these
days.)
Chris
6:49 a.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
On Sun, 09 Jul 2017 17:31:24 PDT Chris Torek <torek(a)torek.net> wrote:
Also note that . in regexp doesn't match \n, while ? and * in a
glob expression do. Unix filenames can not contain \0 and /
but everything else is allowed.
It would have
been nice had RE's been the standard way to glob
files, but, that said, when I mention .*\.c to people instead of
*.c they don't much like it.
Regular expressions are more powerful than glob, but much
harder to use correctly. People who have not had exposure
to them get them wrong all the time. The most common mistakes,
in my experience, are or include:
- Forgetting to quote ".": "pat.h" accidentally matches
file "patch"! This should read "pat\.h" (but see next
point).
- Forgetting to anchor expressions on left and/or right:
"x\.c" matches "x.cc". This should read "x\.c$" (or
even
"^x\.c$" or perhaps ".*/x\.c$"). 
11 Jul
11 Jul
2:16 a.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
On Sun, Jul 9, 2017, at 17:29, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Sun, 9 Jul 2017, Arthur Krewat wrote:
"Rename" and "copy" still do that today on windows, with their own
unique rules for how the pattern on the right is interpreted (a ? or *
will take characters from the same position in the source file's name,
more or less, and a dot will advance to a dot in the source filename.
More at
https://superuser.com/questions/475874/how-does-the-windows-rename-command-…
including some nuances I hadn't been aware of before)
TOPS-10 came out as "MONITOR" in 1967,
and while I'm not sure it started
out with * and ?, it definitely had it early on.
Not saying TOPS-10 was the originator of *, but it was certainly around
in at least one other operating system.
I vaguely remember something like "PIP *.TXT *.OLD" to rename files (the
"*" was interpreted by the command itself, not the interpreter). 
9 Jul
9 Jul
8:51 p.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
I never asked the originators. In fact, I don't think I've ever used
glob outside of the shell...
It's interesting to contemplate how the world might be different if we
had used regular expressions consistently in the shell as well as the
editor(s). We could have picked some other character like : to
indicate the file extension. I suspect we would have had regular
expressions built into all kinds of things...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug McIlroy" <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
To:<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Sun, 09 Jul 2017 08:26:56 -0400
Subject:Re: [TUHS] origin of the name 'glob'
Glob was an an accident. When Ken and Dennis wanted to put wildcards
(an anachronistic word--it wasn't used in the Unix lab at the time)
into the shell, there wasn't room, so they came up with the clever
hack
of calling another process to do the work.
I have always understood that glob meant global because commands like
rm *
would be applied to every file in a directory. A relationship to ed's
g command was clear, but not primary in my mind.
One curious fact is that from day one the word hase been pronounced
glob,
not globe. (By contrast, creat has been variously pronounced cree-at
and create.) It is also interesting to speculate on whether there
would
be a glob library routine in Linux had glob only been an identifier
in
sh.c rather than an entry in /bin.
I believe the simple * was borrowed from somewhere else. If the g
command
had been the driving model, glob would probably have had ? and ?*,
not
? and *. (It couldn't use ed's . because . was ubiquitous in file
names.)
My etymology is somewhat different from Steve's. But I never asked
the
originator(s). Steve, did you?
Doug
10:38 p.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
back when glob was a separate binary it was pretty easy to spawn glob from
things other than the shell, which was kind of neat. You'd get shell
globbing in anything. But jamming globbing into the shell was overall
probably a good thing ...
ron
On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 7:53 AM Steve Johnson <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
I never asked the originators. In fact, I don't
think I've ever used glob
outside of the shell...
It's interesting to contemplate how the world might be different if we had
used regular expressions consistently in the shell as well as the
editor(s). We could have picked some other character like : to indicate
the file extension. I suspect we would have had regular expressions built
into all kinds of things...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Doug McIlroy" <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
To:
<tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:
Sun, 09 Jul 2017 08:26:56 -0400
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] origin of the name 'glob'
Glob was an an accident. When Ken and Dennis wanted to put wildcards
(an anachronistic word--it wasn't used in the Unix lab at the time)
into the shell, there wasn't room, so they came up with the clever hack
of calling another process to do the work.
I have always understood that glob meant global because commands like
rm *
would be applied to every file in a directory. A relationship to ed's
g command was clear, but not primary in my mind.
One curious fact is that from day one the word hase been pronounced glob,
not globe. (By contrast, creat has been variously pronounced cree-at
and create.) It is also interesting to speculate on whether there would
be a glob library routine in Linux had glob only been an identifier in
sh.c rather than an entry in /bin.
I believe the simple * was borrowed from somewhere else. If the g command
had been the driving model, glob would probably have had ? and ?*, not
? and *. (It couldn't use ed's . because . was ubiquitous in file names.)
My etymology is somewhat different from Steve's. But I never asked the
originator(s). Steve, did you?
Doug
11 Jul
11 Jul
2:17 a.m.
New subject: origin of the name 'glob'
On Sun, Jul 9, 2017, at 08:26, Doug McIlroy wrote:
It is also interesting to speculate on whether there
would
be a glob library routine in Linux had glob only been an identifier in
sh.c rather than an entry in /bin.
I'm not sure - wordexp exists, and that was never a separate program.
Both first appeared in POSIX.2, as far as I can tell. They appear in
4.4BSD but not any earlier version of BSD, and not that I can find in
System V. The implementation in OpenSolaris is not SysV-derived. This
suggests to me that they were invented by the committee.
The first appearance of "fnmatch" in the Google archive of Usenet is a
1986 post about a library routine for Amiga (accompanied by a vaguely
glob-like "wildexp", and also DOS-style "findfirst/findnext") . The
first Unix-related appearance was a 1990 article about the progress of
the POSIX.2 standard itself.
I suppose it's possible that without the memory of a "glob" utility, a
findfirst/findnext-style routine might have been implemented instead (or
just findnext - findfirst would be equivalent to opendir+findnext).
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9 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
Arthur Krewat -
Bakul Shah -
Chris Torek -
Dave Horsfall -
Doug McIlroy -
Random832 -
ron minnich -
Steve Johnson