globbing

Globbing refers to running wildcard searches for file names - using an asterisk to search for multiple characters, or a question mark to search for a single character. Globbing can be used in Windows command prompt, Powershell and Python to find file names.

So for example a simple wildcard search like this in command prompt is an example of globbing: dir *.png OR java*

The Tip of the Night for February 16, 2019 showed how to use the glob command in Python to get a list of files. Standard regular expression style syntax can be used with the glob command to run more complicated file name searches. For example: glob.glob('java[0-3].*')