Glob Pattern Tester

Globs are the wildcard patterns used by shells, build tools, CI pipelines and ignore files to select files. They look alike everywhere, but the details differ between tools, and a pattern that selects slightly too much or too little is easy to miss.

What * and ** match

A single * matches within one path segment and never crosses a slash, so *.ts matches index.ts but not src/index.ts. A ** that forms a whole segment matches any number of directories, including none, so **/*.ts matches both. Inside a segment, ** behaves like a single *. At the end of a pattern, a/** needs at least one thing under a, so it matches a/b but not a itself.

*.ts          index.ts           (not src/index.ts)
**/*.ts       index.ts, src/a/b.ts
src/**        src/a, src/a/b     (not src)

Dotfiles are skipped

By default, * ? [abc] and ** do not match a name that starts with a dot, so * will not select .env and **/*.yml will not enter .github. A pattern segment must itself start with a literal dot to match one, as .* does. Most tools offer a dot option to change this, and it is a frequent reason a config in a hidden folder is silently ignored.

*          .env      (no match)
.*         .env      (match)
.github/** .github/workflows/ci.yml  (match)

Braces and classes

{js,ts} expands into several patterns before matching, and {1..3} expands to a range of numbers, so *.{js,ts} is the same as *.js plus *.ts. A character class such as [0-9] matches one character from a set, and [!0-9] or [^0-9] matches one outside it. None of them match a slash.

src/**/*.{ts,tsx}
file{1..3}.txt
log[0-9].txt

Globs are not regular expressions

In a glob, * means any run of characters and . is just a dot. In a regular expression, * repeats the previous item and . means any character, so the same text means something different. Converting is mechanical: * becomes [^/]*, ? becomes [^/], and ** between slashes becomes a repeat of whole directory segments. The tester shows the regular expression each glob is equivalent to.

Open the Glob pattern tester generator

Frequently asked questions

Why does my pattern match in one tool but not another?

Tools differ on dotfiles, on whether a pattern is tested against the full path or just the file name, on trailing slashes, and on negation with a leading exclamation mark. This tester follows minimatch and Node's path.matchesGlob, which many JavaScript tools use.

Does ** work in a plain shell?

Not by default in bash, where it acts like a single *. Enable it with shopt -s globstar. zsh and most build tools support it out of the box.

How do I match a literal * or ? in a name?

Escape it with a backslash, as in a\*, or put it in a class, as in a[*]. Both tell the matcher to treat the character as text.

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