Re: starstar "**" symbol

[Clark J. Wang]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 04:31, aleksandergajewski <
aleksandergajewski@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, i've just come across vim startstar symbol - here's note from vim
> help:
>
> << CUT HERE >>
>   The usage of '*' is quite simple: It matches 0 or more characters.
> In a
>   search pattern this would be ".*".  Note that the "." is not used
> for file
>   searching.
>
>   '**' is more sophisticated:
>      - It ONLY matches directories.
>      - It matches up to 30 directories deep by default, so you can
> use it to
>        search an entire directory tree
>      - The maximum number of levels matched can be given by appending
> a number
>        to '**'.
>        Thus '/usr/**2' can match: >
>                /usr
>                /usr/include
>                /usr/include/sys
>                /usr/include/g++
>                /usr/lib
>                /usr/lib/X11
>                ....
> <       It does NOT match '/usr/include/g++/std' as this would be
> three
>        levels.
>        The allowed number range is 0 ('**0' is removed) to 100
>        If the given number is smaller than 0 it defaults to 30, if
> it's
>        bigger than 100 th<< CUT HERE >>en 100 is used.  The system
> also has a limit on the
>        path length, usually 256 or 1024 bytes.
>      - '**' can only be at the end of the path or be followed by a
> path
>        separator or by a number and a path separator.
> << CUT HERE >>
>
> Every time I wanted to use recursive search in bash, i wrote simple
> script, or did manually (eg. ls */*.txt; ls */*/*.txt etc.), then I
> found 'find + xargs', but in fact '**' would be sufficient for my
> needs (and it seems to be more useful in most cases)
>
> Here is my question: why there is no such thing in bash? Is there any
> compatibility issue, which makes it difficult/impossible to introduce
> in bash?
>

Bash 4.0 added a new shopt option `globstar'. ... When enabled, the
globbing code treats `**' specially -- it matches all directories (and
files within them, when appropriate) recursively.

Is that what you want?