What Is Globbing?

If you like playing board games with your loved ones, you will undoubtedly love this one. Globbing is like a great game of Charades: you have to figure out what the other person is trying to say. When globbing is used, a wildcard character is used to evaluate or request sets of files with the same partial names or locations of characters. Globbing is the process by which users seek out filenames across a specific domain using an unknown character or string. It's like when you're talking to someone, and they say "file," and you have no idea what they mean. You have to guess based on context clues, but there are many possibilities! If they said "file," maybe they're talking about a document, but it could also be a picture file, a video, an audio file. The list goes on. Globbing is one of the most common file management tasks that a programmer has to do. There are two ways to do it: a question mark or an asterisk. The question mark method is more popular, but both go back to the days of command-line operating systems like PC-DOS. In these systems, a user would enter a command for the operating system to search through their drive and return lists of files with specific extensions, for example, all files with a *. html extension. The user would then choose which ones they wanted to open. The asterisk method was also used in these early operating systems and more modern ones like Unix. It allowed users to search for specific partial titles within files without knowing precisely what they were looking for. For example, if they wanted all files with the word "website" in the title or subtitle, they could enter l*website** and find everything on their drive that matched those criteria!