Editing Glob (programming) (section)

==Origin==
The glob command, short for ''global'', originates in the earliest versions of Bell Labs' [[Unix]].<ref name="man7Unix1"/> The command interpreters of the early versions of Unix (1st through 6th Editions, 1969–1975) relied on a separate program to expand [[wildcard character]]s in unquoted arguments to a command: ''/etc/glob''. That program performed the expansion and supplied the expanded list of file paths to the command for execution.

Glob was originally written in the [[B (programming language)|B programming language]]. It was the first piece of mainline Unix software to be developed in a [[high-level programming language]].<ref name="reader">{{cite tech report |first1=M. D. |last1=McIlroy |author-link1=Doug McIlroy |year=1987 |url=http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf |title=A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 |series=CSTR |number=139 |institution=Bell Labs}}</ref> Later, this functionality was provided as a C [[library function]], <code>glob()</code>, used by programs such as the [[Bourne shell|shell]]. It is usually defined based on a function named <code>fnmatch()</code>, which tests for whether a string matches a given pattern - the program using this function can then iterate through a series of strings (usually filenames) to determine which ones match. Both functions are a part of [[POSIX]]: the functions defined in POSIX.1 since 2001, and the syntax defined in POSIX.2.<ref name=fnmatch3>{{man|3|fnmatch|Linux}}</ref><ref>{{man|3|glob|Linux}}</ref> The idea of defining a separate match function started with [[wildmat]] (wildcard match), a simple library to match strings against Bourne Shell globs.

Traditionally, globs do not match hidden files in the form of Unix [[dotfiles]]; to match them the pattern must explicitly start with <code>.</code>. For example, <code>*</code> matches all visible files while <code>.*</code> matches all hidden files.