"Glob"

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <1991Apr15.172740.13288 at mccc.edu>, pjh at mccc.edu (Peter J. Holsberg) writes:
|> What is the etymology of the word "glob"?

  I'm not sure exactly where the word came from, but here's what the Jargon
File(*) has to say about it:

glob: /glob/, *not* /glohb/ [UNIX] vt.,n. To expand special
   characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing (the action
   is also called `globbing').  The UNIX conventions for filename
   wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers
   use some of them in written English, especially in email or news on
   technical topics.  Those commonly encountered include:

     *    wildcard for any string (see also {UN*X}).
     ?    wildcard for any character (generally only read this way
          at the beginning or in the middle of a word).
     []   delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed characters.
     {}   alternation of comma-separated alternatives.  Thus,
          `foo{baz,qux}' would be read as `foobaz' or `fooqux'.

   Some examples: "He said his name was [KC]arl" (expresses
   ambiguity).  "That got posted to talk.politics.*" (all the
   talk.politics subgroups on {USENET}).  Other examples are given
   under the entry for {X}.  Compare {regexp}.

   Historical note: the jargon usage derives from `glob', the
   name of a subprogram that expanded wildcards in archaic Bourne
   Shell versions; this was necessary because early UNIX machines had
   so little memory that the glob routine and the rest of the shell
   could not be co-resident within 64K of code plus data.

(*) Available for anonymous ftp in /pub/jargon/jargon2.8.3.Z on
pit-manager.mit.edu (18.72.1.58), or via mail server (send mail with contents
"send help" and "send jargon/index" on separate lines to
mail-server at pit-manager.mit.edu).

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