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intellij-ideagoglob

Golang weird behavior using filepath.Glob

I'm confused about glob usage on Golang, I'm probably missing some environment variable. I don't know if I'm doing it right.

This code works perfectly fine when ran on my IDE (Intellij IDEA), but when this is ran on the OS via go run it doesn't work. I can't figure out what is the difference.

package main

import (
    "path/filepath"
    "fmt"
    "os"
)

func main() {

    file := os.Args[1]

    matches, err := filepath.Glob(file)

    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
        os.Exit(1)
    }
    fmt.Println(fmt.Sprintf("Number of matches:%d", len(matches)))
    fmt.Println(matches)
}

Running on OS

go run globtest.go /Users/bernardovale/glotest/*.bkp
Number of matches:1
[/Users/bernardovale/glotest/test1.bkp]

ls -l /Users/bernardovale/glotest/*.bkp
-rw-r--r--  1 bernardovale  staff  0 May 27 12:06 /Users/bernardovale/glotest/test1.bkp
-rw-r--r--  1 bernardovale  staff  0 May 27 12:06 /Users/bernardovale/glotest/test2.bkp
-rw-r--r--  1 bernardovale  staff  0 May 27 12:06 /Users/bernardovale/glotest/test3.bkp

Running on IntelliJ IDEA

go run on the IDEA

Solution

  • The difference here is that the shell is executing the glob and providing the individual values to your application. When executing from a shell you should wrap a glob in double quotes to make sure it's not evaluated by your shell first. See the example below.

    Seans-MBP-2:~ sthorne$ echo Testing*
Testing Testing2 Testing3
Seans-MBP-2:~ sthorne$ echo "Testing*"
Testing*