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I'm using bash. Suppose I have a file named filelist, which contains a list of files:

stuff/**/*.csv # to keep it simple (without loops), assume just one entry #*.txt #foo.md #bar.bin

And I want to expand that:

ls $(cat filelist)

I get:

ls: cannot access 'stuff/**/*.csv': No such file or directory

What I want is to expand that into a list of files which I can pipe to my main app for processing. How can I do that?

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  • The last command work fine for me. What is the result of set -o|grep glob? Commented Dec 30, 2023 at 8:42
  • @RomeoNinov noglob off Commented Dec 30, 2023 at 11:50
  • @ilkkachu bash (it's already noted as a tag). I'll add that to the question text too. Commented Dec 30, 2023 at 12:25
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    @lonix my guess is that you expect ** to do recursive globbing, right? But that needs to be enabled in bash; check the output of shopt for globstar! Commented Dec 30, 2023 at 13:58
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    @lonix, yes, I wondered why the output of set -o mentioned above wouldn't show the other glob-related options, and jumped to expect you'd be running some non-Bash shell by mistake (people do that a lot with scripts). But of course e.g. globstar isn't a set -o option, but a shopt option, sigh. So yeah, my bad, sorry about that. Commented Dec 30, 2023 at 14:34

1 Answer 1

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My guess is that you expect ** to do recursive globbing, right? But that's not enabled by default in Bash and needs to be enabled via shopt -s globstar (similarly to dotglob and extglob). You can also check the value with shopt globstar.

(Or shopt |grep glob to echo the suggestion of set -o |grep glob in the comments; note the difference between shopt and set -o here.)

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