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The archetypal use of wildcards is for matching against the files in a directory, and making a list of all the matches. This is called globbing.
You could do this using fnmatch
, by reading the directory entries
one by one and testing each one with fnmatch
. But that would be
slow (and complex, since you would have to handle subdirectories by
hand).
The library provides a function glob
to make this particular use
of wildcards convenient. glob
and the other symbols in this
section are declared in glob.h.