NodeJS cool utils (Minimatch, Glob)

Dec 30, 2012

In my quest to learn nodejs i like to navigate github and randomly looking at popular nodejs repositories to see it’s tests and what problem it solves.

I was looking at Isaac Schlueter repositories ( he is the main developer of nodejs right now). His github account is here

Minimatch

Minimatch is a minimal pattern matching library It’s useful when you want a quick match and don’t want to write regular expressions directly

Eg.

Matching javascript files:

Matching paths that end with /bin

##Glob

Glob is related to minimatch but navigates de filesystem and returns a list of paths that match a minimatch expression. This is great to find a list of files or directory paths that match a given expression.

The globbing concept in bash

The concept of globbing is part of bash and this allows you to use some kind of filters to find files based on their path(where you cannot/don’t want to use regex directly)

For example if you want to find all the files that start with importantFileV and have xml extension you can use

ls -l importantFileV?.xml 

This would return the following results

• importantFileV1.xml, importantFileV2.xml, importantFileV3.xml

There are some cool things you can do with globbing

Find all files that start with the word important

ls -l important* 

Find all files that have version 1 to 5

ls -l importantFileV\[1-5].js

Find all the files that don’t have the word test in them

ls -l [^test]*

Globbing in nodejs

I’m using my blog for documenting my learning process, i hope someone finds this useful too.