Re: Globbing versus regular expressions

Axel Reichert <mail@axel-reichert.de> wrote:

Hi all,
 
a colleague (new to command line wizardry) seemed puzzled by the
existence of both globbing for file names (shell) and regular
expressions for strings (many other command line tools).
 
Since I am familiar with both mechanisms for decades, I never thought
about this "redundancy", but now I think he has a point, even more so if
you are using the "dired" file manager in Emacs, which further blurs the
distinction between mangling text and working on files.
 
Since regexes are (at quick glance) a superset of globs, why not
consistently use the former for both file names and strings? The
few additional keystrokes (.* instead of *) are IMHO easily compensated
for by the more powerful capabilities of regexes.
 
A little reading on Wikipedia showed that both came into popular usage
in the early 70s. So why was globbing not dropped and regexes used
throughout? It seems that ksh93 supports "regex globbing". bash has
"extended globbing", but this seems a clumsy, bolted-on solution. Are
there shells out there which follow a regex-only approach (of this would
be non-POSIX)?
 
Happy for any further insights (technical or historical) shed on this
topic!

I guess, glob style matching is just easier to learn, especially
for non-technical persons.  In regular expressions you have more
special characters you cannot use unescaped, like e.g. the dot,
which is part of many filenames.  This makes it more inconvenient
to use in the context of file handling and it also takes more time
to learn all the details.  I know both systems and I also tend to
use globbing when working with files, even if regex is available.
Most of the time you don't need the more complex possibilities regex
provides.