glob (programming)

In computer programming, glob (/ɡlɒb/) patterns specify sets of filenames with wildcard characters. For example, the Unix Bash shell command mv *.txt textfiles/ moves all files with names ending in .txt from the current directory to the directory textfiles. Here, * is a wildcard and *.txt is a glob pattern. The wildcard * stands for "any string of any length including empty, but excluding the path separator characters (/ in unix and \ in windows)".

The other common wildcard is the question mark (?), which stands for one character. For example, mv ?.txt shorttextfiles/ will move all files named with a single character followed by .txt from the current directory to directory shorttextfiles, while ??.txt would match all files whose name consists of 2 characters followed by .txt.

In addition to matching filenames, globs are also used widely for matching arbitrary strings (wildcard matching). In this capacity a common interface is fnmatch.