Excluding paths¶
Starting from version 0.5.3, browsepy accepts –exclude command line arguments expecting linux filename expansion strings, also known as globs.
Note (windows): on nt platforms, the accepted glob syntax will be the same
(/ for filepath separator and \ used for character escapes),
browsepy will transform them appropriately.
They allow matching filemames using wildcards, being the most common * (matching any string, even empty) and ? (matching a single character). See Glob manpage for further info.
Please note that both collating symbols (like [.a-acute.]) and
equivalence class expressions (like [=a=]) are currently unsupported.
Excluded paths will be omitted from both directory listing and directory tarball downloads.
As seen at Usage, the exclude parameter can be provided as follows:
browsepy --exclude=.*
The above example will exclude all files prefixed with ., which are
considered hidden on POSIX systems. In other words, it will match .myfile
and not my.file.
You can, alternatively, restrict the above exclusion to only top-level filenames:
browsepy --exclude=/.*
The following example will hide all files ending with .ini, but only on the
base directory.
browsepy --exclude=/*.ini
You will find this syntax very similar to definitions found in .gitignore, .dockerignore and others ignore definition files. As browsepy uses same format, you can pass them to browsepy using –exclude-from options.
browsepy --exclude-from=.gitignore
Glob manpage¶
As glob reference, this is returned by man glob.7.
GLOB(7) Linux Programmer's Manual GLOB(7)
NAME
glob - globbing pathnames
DESCRIPTION
Long ago, in UNIX V6, there was a program /etc/glob that
would expand wildcard patterns. Soon afterward this became
a shell built-in.
These days there is also a library routine glob(3) that
will perform this function for a user program.
The rules are as follows (POSIX.2, 3.13).
Wildcard matching
A string is a wildcard pattern if it contains one of the
characters '?', '*' or '['. Globbing is the operation that
expands a wildcard pattern into the list of pathnames
matching the pattern. Matching is defined by:
A '?' (not between brackets) matches any single character.
A '*' (not between brackets) matches any string, including
the empty string.
Character classes
An expression "[...]" where the first character after the
leading '[' is not an '!' matches a single character,
namely any of the characters enclosed by the brackets. The
string enclosed by the brackets cannot be empty; therefore
']' can be allowed between the brackets, provided that it
is the first character. (Thus, "[][!]" matches the three
characters '[', ']' and '!'.)
Ranges
There is one special convention: two characters separated
by '-' denote a range. (Thus, "[A-Fa-f0-9]" is equivalent
to "[ABCDEFabcdef0123456789]".) One may include '-' in its
literal meaning by making it the first or last character
between the brackets. (Thus, "[]-]" matches just the two
characters ']' and '-', and "[--0]" matches the three char‐
acters '-', '.', '0', since '/' cannot be matched.)
Complementation
An expression "[!...]" matches a single character, namely
any character that is not matched by the expression
obtained by removing the first '!' from it. (Thus,
"[!]a-]" matches any single character except ']', 'a' and
'-'.)
One can remove the special meaning of '?', '*' and '[' by
preceding them by a backslash, or, in case this is part of
a shell command line, enclosing them in quotes. Between
brackets these characters stand for themselves. Thus,
"[[?*\]" matches the four characters '[', '?', '*' and '\'.
Pathnames
Globbing is applied on each of the components of a pathname
separately. A '/' in a pathname cannot be matched by a '?'
or '*' wildcard, or by a range like "[.-0]". A range con‐
taining an explicit '/' character is syntactically incor‐
rect. (POSIX requires that syntactically incorrect pat‐
terns are left unchanged.)
If a filename starts with a '.', this character must be
matched explicitly. (Thus, rm * will not remove .profile,
and tar c * will not archive all your files; tar c . is
better.)
Empty lists
The nice and simple rule given above: "expand a wildcard
pattern into the list of matching pathnames" was the origi‐
nal UNIX definition. It allowed one to have patterns that
expand into an empty list, as in
xv -wait 0 *.gif *.jpg
where perhaps no *.gif files are present (and this is not
an error). However, POSIX requires that a wildcard pattern
is left unchanged when it is syntactically incorrect, or
the list of matching pathnames is empty. With bash one can
force the classical behavior using this command:
shopt -s nullglob
(Similar problems occur elsewhere. For example, where old
scripts have
rm `find . -name "*~"`
new scripts require
rm -f nosuchfile `find . -name "*~"`
to avoid error messages from rm called with an empty argu‐
ment list.)
NOTES
Regular expressions
Note that wildcard patterns are not regular expressions,
although they are a bit similar. First of all, they match
filenames, rather than text, and secondly, the conventions
are not the same: for example, in a regular expression '*'
means zero or more copies of the preceding thing.
Now that regular expressions have bracket expressions where
the negation is indicated by a '^', POSIX has declared the
effect of a wildcard pattern "[^...]" to be undefined.
Character classes and internationalization
Of course ranges were originally meant to be ASCII ranges,
so that "[ -%]" stands for "[ !"#$%]" and "[a-z]" stands
for "any lowercase letter". Some UNIX implementations gen‐
eralized this so that a range X-Y stands for the set of
characters with code between the codes for X and for Y.
However, this requires the user to know the character cod‐
ing in use on the local system, and moreover, is not conve‐
nient if the collating sequence for the local alphabet dif‐
fers from the ordering of the character codes. Therefore,
POSIX extended the bracket notation greatly, both for wild‐
card patterns and for regular expressions. In the above we
saw three types of items that can occur in a bracket
expression: namely (i) the negation, (ii) explicit single
characters, and (iii) ranges. POSIX specifies ranges in an
internationally more useful way and adds three more types:
(iii) Ranges X-Y comprise all characters that fall between
X and Y (inclusive) in the current collating sequence as
defined by the LC_COLLATE category in the current locale.
(iv) Named character classes, like
[:alnum:] [:alpha:] [:blank:] [:cntrl:]
[:digit:] [:graph:] [:lower:] [:print:]
[:punct:] [:space:] [:upper:] [:xdigit:]
so that one can say "[[:lower:]]" instead of "[a-z]", and
have things work in Denmark, too, where there are three
letters past 'z' in the alphabet. These character classes
are defined by the LC_CTYPE category in the current locale.
(v) Collating symbols, like "[.ch.]" or "[.a-acute.]",
where the string between "[." and ".]" is a collating ele‐
ment defined for the current locale. Note that this may be
a multicharacter element.
(vi) Equivalence class expressions, like "[=a=]", where the
string between "[=" and "=]" is any collating element from
its equivalence class, as defined for the current locale.
For example, "[[=a=]]" might be equivalent to "[aáàäâ]",
that is, to "[a[.a-acute.][.a-grave.][.a-umlaut.][.a-cir‐
cumflex.]]".
SEE ALSO
sh(1), fnmatch(3), glob(3), locale(7), regex(7)
COLOPHON
This page is part of release 4.10 of the Linux man-pages
project. A description of the project, information about
reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be
found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2016-10-08 GLOB(7)