Globbing Patterns

When a command has an argument with a type of Globber for a file path, that means you can use file globbing patterns to affect more than one file at a time. Globbing patterns are common in Bash as well as places like your .gitignore file. They use common wildcard patterns to provide a partial path that can match zero or hundreds of files all at the same time.

"?" matches a single character

If a globbing pattern contains a question mark, that will match any single character. So a pattern of ca?.txt would match car.txt, and cat.txt, but not cart.txt. You can use a wildcard more than once. p?p?.cf? would match files named papa.cfm and pipe.cfc.

"*" matches any number of characters within name

If a globbing pattern contains a single asterisks, that will match zero or more characters inside a filename or folder name. So d*o matches doodoo, dao, and just do. The wildcard only counts inside a file or folder name, so models/*.cfc will only match cfc files in the root of the models folder.

"**" matches any number of characters across all directories

To extend the previous example, if we did models/**.cfc that would match any cfc file in any subdirectory, no matter how deep.

Globbing examples

Here's some examples of what file globbing might look like:

CommandBox> rm temp*.txt
CommandBox> cp *.cfm backup/
CommandBox> touch build/*.properties

Here's some more examples of how the wildcards work

// Match any file or folder starting with "foo"
foo*

// Match any file or folder starting with "foo" and ending with .txt
foo*.txt

// Match any file or folder ending with "foo"
*foo 

// Match a/b/z but not a/b/c/z
a/*/z

// Match a/z and a/b/z and a/b/c/z
a/**/z

// Matches hat but not ham or h/t
/h?t