Globbing: g

Glob pattern matching for file system objects (eg *.txt)

Description

Returns a list of files and directories that match a glob pattern.

Output is a JSON list.

Usage

g pattern -> <stdout>

!g pattern -> <stdout>

<stdin> -> g pattern -> <stdout>

<stdin> -> !g pattern -> <stdout>

Examples

Inline globbing

cat @{ g *.txt }

Writing a JSON array of files to disk

g *.txt |> filelist.json

Checking if a file exists

if { g somefile.txt } then {
    # file exists
}

Checking if a file does not exist

!if { g somefile.txt } then {
    # file does not exist
}

Return all files apart from

!g *.txt

Filtering a file list based on glob matches

f +f -> g *.html

Remove any glob matches from a file list

f +f -> !g *.html

Files in directories that begin with a vowel

g [aeiou]*/*

Detail

Pattern Reference

Murex globbing is based on Go’s stdlib Match library.

pattern

{ term }

term

'*'         matches any sequence of non-Separator characters
'?'         matches any single non-Separator character
'[' [ '^' ] { character-range } ']'
            character class (must be non-empty)
c           matches character c (c != '*', '?', '\\', '[')
'\\' c      matches character c

character-range

c           matches character c (c != '\\', '-', ']')
'\\' c      matches character c
lo '-' hi   matches character c for lo <= c <= hi

Inverse Matches

If you want to exclude any matches based on wildcards, rather than include them, then you can use the bang prefix. For example, here we use an asterisks to exclude everything:

» !g *
Error in `!g` (1,1): No data returned.

When Used As A Method

!g first looks for files that match its pattern, then it reads the file list from stdin. If stdin contains contents that are not files then !g might not handle those list items correctly. This shouldn’t be an issue with frx in its normal mode because it is only looking for matches however when used as !g any items that are not files will leak through.

This is its designed feature and not a bug. If you wish to remove anything that also isn’t a file then you should first pipe into either g *, rx .*, or f +f and then pipe that into !g.

The reason for this behavior is to separate this from !regexp and !match.

Synonyms

See Also

This document was generated from builtins/core/io/g_doc.yaml.

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Last built on Sat Aug 23 22:28:13 UTC 2025 against commit ad23f13ad23f131bfecd82ea8a12d9b3e92aab5d8398ae9.

Current version is 7.0.2129 (website) which has been verified against tests cases.