[Python-ideas] Adding '**' recursive search to glob.glob

[Vinay Sajip]

Paul Moore <p.f.moore at ...> writes:

> I'd like it if the glob module supported the (relatively common)
> facility to use ** to mean recursively search subdirectories. It's a
> reasonably straightforward patch, and offers a feature that is fairly
> difficult to implement in user code on top of the existing
> functionality. The syntax is supported in a number of places (for
> example the bash shell and things like Java Ant) so it will be
> relatively familiar to users.

Agreed. This was in packaging/distutils2 and I have now got it in distlib [1];
it supports both recursive globs and variants using the {opt1,opt2,op3} syntax.

> One obvious downside is that if used carelessly, it can make globbing
> pretty slow. So I'd propose that it be added as an optional extension
> enabled using a flag argument (glob(pat, allow_recursive=True)) which
> is false by default. That would also mean that backward compatibility
> should not be an issue.

Isn't the requirement to recurse implied by the presence of '**' in the
pattern? What's to be gained by specifying it using allow_recursive as well?
Will having allow_recursive=True have any effect if '**' is not in the
pattern? If you specify a pattern with '**' and allow_recursive=False, does
that mean that '**' effectively acts as '*' would (i.e. one directory level
only)?

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

[1]
https://bitbucket.org/vinay.sajip/distlib/src/29666/distlib/glob.py?at=default