Origin and Evolution of the Globstar
16 days ago
- #programming
- #shell-scripting
- #history
- The double-asterisk (**) recursive glob pattern was introduced by Zsh in the early 1990s, evolving from experimental syntax to the familiar **/ by 1992.
- KornShell (ksh93) independently introduced ** around 2003, naming it 'globstar' and popularizing the concept in the UNIX community.
- Bash adopted ** in version 4.0 (2009) under the 'globstar' option, influenced by ksh93, making it widely available to mainstream users.
- The pattern spread to programming languages like Ruby (early 2000s), Python (3.5+), JavaScript/Node.js, and Java (7+), as well as build tools like Apache Ant and Git.
- Despite lack of POSIX standardization, ** became a de facto standard by the 2010s, widely used in scripts, build tools, and configuration files.
- Zsh is credited with inventing **, ksh93 with naming it 'globstar', and Bash with distributing it widely.