pathlib glob ignores trailing slash in pattern

@pitrou

BPO	22276
Nosy	@pitrou, @bitdancer, @emilyemorehouse, @robbuckley, @akulakov
PRs	bpo-22276: Fix pathlib.Path.glob not to ignore trailing path separator #10349

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

Show more details

GitHub fields:

assignee = 'https://github.com/emilyemorehouse'
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2014-08-26.11:37:22.662>
labels = ['3.8', 'type-bug', 'library']
title = 'pathlib glob ignores trailing slash in pattern'
updated_at = <Date 2021-11-21.02:47:05.959>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/jocabt'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2021-11-21.02:47:05.959>
actor = 'andrei.avk'
assignee = 'emilyemorehouse'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Library (Lib)']
creation = <Date 2014-08-26.11:37:22.662>
creator = 'joca.bt'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 22276
keywords = ['patch']
message_count = 9.0
messages = ['225914', '226033', '226034', '226036', '226095', '226102', '406700', '406701', '406702']
nosy_count = 7.0
nosy_names = ['pitrou', 'r.david.murray', 'cvrebert', 'joca.bt', 'emilyemorehouse', 'robbuckley', 'andrei.avk']
pr_nums = ['10349']
priority = 'normal'
resolution = None
stage = 'patch review'
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'behavior'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue22276'
versions = ['Python 3.8']

Both fnmatch and glob support the "*/" glob. However, pathlib does not seem to handle this kind of globs correctly.

dir = Path("/a/directory/")
file = Path("/a/file")
print(dir.match("*/")) # True
print(file.match("*/")) # True

The "/" is being discarded by the match, resulting in incorrect matches.

Both the fnmatch and glob libraries support this correct.
print(fnmatch("/a/directory/", "*/")) # True
print(fnmatch("/a/file", "*/")) # False

bpo-21039 may be related to this.

What is "*/" supposed to do? Only select directories?

Yes.

Heh. I never noticed that about shell globs, but it is logical. Learn something new every day.

Well, it would be logical if pathlib gave special meaning to trailing slashes, which it (still) doesn't :-) I'm still not fond of encoding path characteristics in the path string itself.
(and what about symlinks? etc.)

I'm not sure that a trailing '/' is a "path characteristic" in the same sense that a symlink is. Whether the path has a trailing slash or not has meaning both to the user and to the OS. pathlib isn't just modeling actual path objects on the file system, but the abstract concept of a path, and in the abstract context the presence or absence of a trailing '/' as meaning.

But that's a wider discussion than this issue :)

I have also run into this when looking into path.glob('dangling_symlink') issue.

I can add a few things (in the examples, *myfile* is a file, not a directory):

This is probably more common / less obscure than '*/':

path.glob('myfile/') => True

This is inconsistent with how shell ls command works and with glob.glob() and looks wrong.

Path('myfile/').exists() => True

Path('myfile/') == Path('myfile') => True

str(Path('myfile/')) => 'myfile'

You can compare this to behavior of ls (tested on MacOS):

ls myfile
myfile

ls myfile/
ls: myfile/: Not a directory

I think many users will expect behavior consistent with ls and glob.glob. I've used ls in this manner before.

I meant to say:

path.glob('myfile/') => [PosixPath('myfile')]

Generally if Path is created with a trailing separator, I think it should error out for all methods that apply to files, for example .touch(), read*(), write*(), others.

This is consistent with shell commands:

touch xyz/ touch: xyz/: Not a directory

echo 'blah' > xyz/
zsh: not a directory: xyz/

This was fixed in #10349. This issue could be closed.

Fixed in #10349.

Navigation Menu

Repository navigation

pathlib glob ignores trailing slash in pattern #66472

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

pathlib glob ignores trailing slash in pattern #66472

Description

Activity

jocabt commented on Aug 26, 2014

pitrou commented on Aug 28, 2014

jocabt commented on Aug 28, 2014

bitdancer commented on Aug 28, 2014

pitrou commented on Aug 29, 2014

bitdancer commented on Aug 29, 2014

akulakov commented on Nov 21, 2021

akulakov commented on Nov 21, 2021

akulakov commented on Nov 21, 2021

barneygale commented on Jul 22, 2022

barneygale commented on Jan 8, 2023

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Issue actions