Doug Robinson wrote on Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 09:05:53 -0400: > Daniel: > > Sorry for the delay - I missed the post.
No worries. > That said, in discussions I've had I think about the SVN regex "**" > differently than the zsh construct. The way that I interpret "/**" is > "everything below and including slash" - so "**" is the moral equivalent of > Perl's ".*" wildcard. It need not be followed by any terminal pattern to > match anything - since it matches them all. If it was followed by > something then that something would be required. > Note that your terminology is backwards: "**" is a wildcard and ".*" is a regex. > So let me break the 3 patterns down: > > /*/*/** This requires 2 directories. It will match all directories 2 > levels down - and then everything in all of the rest of those trees however > deep. It should not, however, match a file or symlink in a directory, e.g. > "/dirA/fileB". Whereas it will match "/dirA/dirB" along with > "/dirA/dirB/fileC", etc. That's an interesting one. Neither vim nor zsh matches dirA/dirB here — they only match dirents _under_ it — but it's certainly defensible to match it, exactly as you say. To clarify, if foo/bar is a symlink then it is not a directory, no matter what its target is and what else exists in the repository. (In particular, if its target is "baz" and foo/baz/ exists, foo/bar is still not a directory.) So, for example, [foo/bar/**] would apply to foo/bar/, iff it exists and is a directory. That sounds good. > /*/**/* This requires 1 directory and then something else. It will match > "/dirA/fileB" or "/dirA/symlinkX" since "/**" can simply go to nothing. Or > perhaps a different way to look at it is that "/**" can match "/" which, in > its simplest will mean "/*/**/*" becomes "/*//*" and given that multiple > '/' always collapse to a single '/' in "path arithmetic" becomes "/*/*" for > its shortest match. Agreed. > /**/*/* This requires 1 directory and then something else. Pretty much > the same as the prior example and for the same reasons. Agreed. Thanks, Daniel
