[Python-ideas] Add OS-dependent automatic glob support

[Skip Montanaro]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 12:09 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <
turnbull at sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

> Which is normally "nothing" on POSIX, since the shell does it for
> you.  Or, if you're talking about what the shell does for you, while I
> suppose there is a basic globbing defined by POSIX, but bash and zsh
> go well beyond that, and they behave somewhat differently in corner
> cases IIRC.
>

Indeed. I only have 2.7.2 available here at work. Here's what bash tells me
on a Linux box:

% ls yen{2,3}.*
yen2.out  yen2.png  yen2.trade yen3.out  yen3.png  yen3.trade
% ls yen[23].*
yen2.out  yen2.png  yen2.trade yen3.out  yen3.png  yen3.trade

Here's what /bin/sh tells me on a Solaris 10 box:

$ ls yen{2,3}.*
yen{2,3}.*: No such file or directory
$ ls yen[23].*
yen2.out    yen2.png    yen2.trade  yen3.out    yen3.png    yen3.trade

Here's what the glob module tells me:

% python
Python 2.7.2 (default, Nov 14 2012, 05:07:35)
[GCC 4.4.6 [TWW]] on linux3
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import glob
>>> glob.glob("yen{2,3}.*")
[]
>>> glob.glob("yen[23].*")
['yen3.trade', 'yen2.out', 'yen2.trade', 'yen3.out', 'yen3.png', 'yen2.png']

I only discovered this "shortcoming" (or "Bourne Shell dependency")
relatively recently. I've been using bash for so long it never even
occurred to me that {...} notation wasn't available in all shells.

Skip
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