Re: ** matches one or more directories, not zero or more

On Wednesday, November 12, 2014 3:29:10 AM UTC+3, ZyX wrote:
> On Tuesday, November 11, 2014 2:11:34 PM UTC+3, Christian Brabandt wrote:
> > Am 2014-11-11 11:30, schrieb John Little:
> > > On Tuesday, November 11, 2014 9:08:59 PM UTC+13, Christian Brabandt
> > > wrote:
> > >> Since the behaviour of ** is not standardized and vim is no shell,
> > >> that
> > >> is no argument for or against anything.
> > >
> > > I beg to differ on that. Vim is obviously copying functionality that
> > > came from shells.
> >
> > I think the Vim implementation of '**' predates the bash implementation
> > (which appears to
> > be available only since bash 4).
>
> There is also (t)csh, zsh, Python, etc. I do not think it is worth digging out who was copying what, but Vim has `**` functionality since at least 3.0.
>
> >
> > But in any case, I am not going to discuss this further, I have
> > mentioned a workaround
> > (which uses an even simpler pattern) and apart from that have no further
> > opinion on that
> > (except that it seems logical to me, to have '/' mean that the pattern
> > must match
> > at a directory).
>
> Your workaround is not correct. `:h autocmd-pattern` implicitly says that `**` for recursive matches is not supported and explicitly says that `*` "matches any sequence of characters: Unusual: includes path". So one should use `~/*.ex` and do not use `~/**.ex` in order to not trick oneself in believing `**` is supported.

By "is supported" I meant "has any special meaning". In your variant writing `**` is as good as writing `.*.*` in regex: it will work, but it is pointless (and will cause minor performance degradation in many regex engines).

>
> Note: if you use `~/**/*.ex` in `:args` command it will behave *exactly as OP requested **even in Vim-3.0***. Thus if `**` was supported in autocmd patterns it was a bug. Unfortunately autocmd patterns are limited regular expressions that match on path and *not* globs which support `**`.
>
> >
> > Best,
> > Christian

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