[boost] Re: Questions on wildcarding boost::filesystem

From: Nicolas Fleury (nfleury_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-04-25 09:17:51

Anthony Williams wrote:
> As there is the question of what to do with "foo.[ch]pp", and other similar
> expressions. The syntax for wildcards depends on the system, so defining a
> portable syntax that looks natural on all supported platforms is not generally
> possible. On one filesystem I know "[abc]foo" is file foo in directory abc. On
> Linux it is the three files afoo, bfoo and cfoo. 

I've never used boost::filesystem yet, but shouldn't regular expressions 
and filenames be two different things?  You could for example build a 
group of files with a regex, specific to boost.  Anyway, the wildcards 
mechanism is not really specific to the OS, but to the shell, so I don't 
think it should be emulated.  Let's not support "*.txt", but instead 
".*\.txt".  Wildcards is something you use mostly in shells.  And to be 
honest, when I do scripting, I prefer to use Perl regular expressions to 
match files, 'cause almost as soon as you use more than * in shells, the 
syntax can vary greatly among shells.

Nicolas