globset: Default for literal_separator

[mschoettle]

I came across this through an application that uses the globset crate. By default literal_separator is false leading to * matching the path separator. My expectation was that * would not match path separators.

This also supported by the man page for glob:

A '/' in a pathname cannot be matched by a '?' or '*' wildcard

What is the reason behind literal_separator being false by default?

[BurntSushi]

I followed glob's example.

And it's also how Python's fnmatch module works:

>>> import fnmatch
>>> fnmatch.fnmatch('foo/bar/demo.txt', '*.txt')
True

I don't think there is any one commonly accepted default. And it depends on context. For a crate like globset, it's common to pass a full path to it. And in that context, it's reasonable to expect that things like *.txt match foo/bar.txt. But in the context of something like glob(7), it's more common to execute a glob in the context of a single directory where you don't expect * to traverse into sub-directories.

To be honest, globbing is a bit of a mess. And like regex, pretty much all implementations have their own little quirks and features.

[mschoettle]

Thanks for the detailed explanation!