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The GNU C Library provides pattern matching facilities for two kinds of patterns: regular expressions and file-name wildcards. The library also provides a facility for expanding variable and command references and parsing text into words in the way the shell does.
1.1 Wildcard Matching | Matching a wildcard pattern against a single string. | |
1.2 Globbing | Finding the files that match a wildcard pattern. | |
1.3 Regular Expression Matching | Matching regular expressions against strings. | |
1.4 Shell-Style Word Expansion | Expanding shell variables, nested commands, arithmetic, and wildcards. This is what the shell does with shell commands. |
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This section describes how to match a wildcard pattern against a particular string. The result is a yes or no answer: does the string fit the pattern or not. The symbols described here are all declared in ‘fnmatch.h’.
This function tests whether the string string matches the pattern
pattern. It returns 0
if they do match; otherwise, it
returns the nonzero value FNM_NOMATCH
. The arguments
pattern and string are both strings.
The argument flags is a combination of flag bits that alter the details of matching. See below for a list of the defined flags.
In the GNU C Library, fnmatch
cannot experience an “error”—it
always returns an answer for whether the match succeeds. However, other
implementations of fnmatch
might sometimes report “errors”.
They would do so by returning nonzero values that are not equal to
FNM_NOMATCH
.
These are the available flags for the flags argument:
FNM_FILE_NAME
Treat the ‘/’ character specially, for matching file names. If this flag is set, wildcard constructs in pattern cannot match ‘/’ in string. Thus, the only way to match ‘/’ is with an explicit ‘/’ in pattern.
FNM_PATHNAME
This is an alias for FNM_FILE_NAME
; it comes from POSIX.2. We
don’t recommend this name because we don’t use the term “pathname” for
file names.
FNM_PERIOD
Treat the ‘.’ character specially if it appears at the beginning of string. If this flag is set, wildcard constructs in pattern cannot match ‘.’ as the first character of string.
If you set both FNM_PERIOD
and FNM_FILE_NAME
, then the
special treatment applies to ‘.’ following ‘/’ as well as to
‘.’ at the beginning of string. (The shell uses the
FNM_PERIOD
and FNM_FILE_NAME
falgs together for matching
file names.)
FNM_NOESCAPE
Don’t treat the ‘\’ character specially in patterns. Normally, ‘\’ quotes the following character, turning off its special meaning (if any) so that it matches only itself. When quoting is enabled, the pattern ‘\?’ matches only the string ‘?’, because the question mark in the pattern acts like an ordinary character.
If you use FNM_NOESCAPE
, then ‘\’ is an ordinary character.
FNM_LEADING_DIR
Ignore a trailing sequence of characters starting with a ‘/’ in string; that is to say, test whether string starts with a directory name that pattern matches.
If this flag is set, either ‘foo*’ or ‘foobar’ as a pattern would match the string ‘foobar/frobozz’.
FNM_CASEFOLD
Ignore case in comparing string to pattern.
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The archetypal use of wildcards is for matching against the files in a directory, and making a list of all the matches. This is called globbing.
You could do this using fnmatch
, by reading the directory entries
one by one and testing each one with fnmatch
. But that would be
slow (and complex, since you would have to handle subdirectories by
hand).
The library provides a function glob
to make this particular use
of wildcards convenient. glob
and the other symbols in this
section are declared in ‘glob.h’.
1.2.1 Calling glob | Basic use of glob .
| |
1.2.2 Flags for Globbing | Flags that enable various options in glob .
|
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glob
The result of globbing is a vector of file names (strings). To return
this vector, glob
uses a special data type, glob_t
, which
is a structure. You pass glob
the address of the structure, and
it fills in the structure’s fields to tell you about the results.
This data type holds a pointer to a word vector. More precisely, it records both the address of the word vector and its size.
gl_pathc
The number of elements in the vector.
gl_pathv
The address of the vector. This field has type char **
.
gl_offs
The offset of the first real element of the vector, from its nominal
address in the gl_pathv
field. Unlike the other fields, this
is always an input to glob
, rather than an output from it.
If you use a nonzero offset, then that many elements at the beginning of
the vector are left empty. (The glob
function fills them with
null pointers.)
The gl_offs
field is meaningful only if you use the
GLOB_DOOFFS
flag. Otherwise, the offset is always zero
regardless of what is in this field, and the first real element comes at
the beginning of the vector.
The function glob
does globbing using the pattern pattern
in the current directory. It puts the result in a newly allocated
vector, and stores the size and address of this vector into
*vector_ptr
. The argument flags is a combination of
bit flags; see Flags for Globbing, for details of the flags.
The result of globbing is a sequence of file names. The function
glob
allocates a string for each resulting word, then
allocates a vector of type char **
to store the addresses of
these strings. The last element of the vector is a null pointer.
This vector is called the word vector.
To return this vector, glob
stores both its address and its
length (number of elements, not counting the terminating null pointer)
into *vector_ptr
.
Normally, glob
sorts the file names alphabetically before
returning them. You can turn this off with the flag GLOB_NOSORT
if you want to get the information as fast as possible. Usually it’s
a good idea to let glob
sort them—if you process the files in
alphabetical order, the users will have a feel for the rate of progress
that your application is making.
If glob
succeeds, it returns 0. Otherwise, it returns one
of these error codes:
GLOB_ABORTED
There was an error opening a directory, and you used the flag
GLOB_ERR
or your specified errfunc returned a nonzero
value.
for an explanation of the GLOB_ERR
flag and errfunc.
GLOB_NOMATCH
The pattern didn’t match any existing files. If you use the
GLOB_NOCHECK
flag, then you never get this error code, because
that flag tells glob
to pretend that the pattern matched
at least one file.
GLOB_NOSPACE
It was impossible to allocate memory to hold the result.
In the event of an error, glob
stores information in
*vector_ptr
about all the matches it has found so far.
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This section describes the flags that you can specify in the
flags argument to glob
. Choose the flags you want,
and combine them with the C bitwise OR operator |
.
GLOB_APPEND
Append the words from this expansion to the vector of words produced by
previous calls to glob
. This way you can effectively expand
several words as if they were concatenated with spaces between them.
In order for appending to work, you must not modify the contents of the
word vector structure between calls to glob
. And, if you set
GLOB_DOOFFS
in the first call to glob
, you must also
set it when you append to the results.
Note that the pointer stored in gl_pathv
may no longer be valid
after you call glob
the second time, because glob
might
have relocated the vector. So always fetch gl_pathv
from the
glob_t
structure after each glob
call; never save
the pointer across calls.
GLOB_DOOFFS
Leave blank slots at the beginning of the vector of words.
The gl_offs
field says how many slots to leave.
The blank slots contain null pointers.
GLOB_ERR
Give up right away and report an error if there is any difficulty
reading the directories that must be read in order to expand pattern
fully. Such difficulties might include a directory in which you don’t
have the requisite access. Normally, glob
tries its best to keep
on going despite any errors, reading whatever directories it can.
You can exercise even more control than this by specifying an
error-handler function errfunc when you call glob
. If
errfunc is not a null pointer, then glob
doesn’t give up
right away when it can’t read a directory; instead, it calls
errfunc with two arguments, like this:
(*errfunc) (filename, error-code)
The argument filename is the name of the directory that
glob
couldn’t open or couldn’t read, and error-code is the
errno
value that was reported to glob
.
If the error handler function returns nonzero, then glob
gives up
right away. Otherwise, it continues.
GLOB_MARK
If the pattern matches the name of a directory, append ‘/’ to the directory’s name when returning it.
GLOB_NOCHECK
If the pattern doesn’t match any file names, return the pattern itself
as if it were a file name that had been matched. (Normally, when the
pattern doesn’t match anything, glob
returns that there were no
matches.)
GLOB_NOSORT
Don’t sort the file names; return them in no particular order. (In practice, the order will depend on the order of the entries in the directory.) The only reason not to sort is to save time.
GLOB_NOESCAPE
Don’t treat the ‘\’ character specially in patterns. Normally, ‘\’ quotes the following character, turning off its special meaning (if any) so that it matches only itself. When quoting is enabled, the pattern ‘\?’ matches only the string ‘?’, because the question mark in the pattern acts like an ordinary character.
If you use GLOB_NOESCAPE
, then ‘\’ is an ordinary character.
glob
does its work by calling the function fnmatch
repeatedly. It handles the flag GLOB_NOESCAPE
by turning on the
FNM_NOESCAPE
flag in calls to fnmatch
.
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The GNU C library supports two interfaces for matching regular expressions. One is the standard POSIX.2 interface, and the other is what the GNU system has had for many years.
Both interfaces are declared in the header file ‘regex.h’.
If you define _POSIX_C_SOURCE
, then only the POSIX.2
functions, structures, and constants are declared.
1.3.1 POSIX Regular Expression Compilation | Using regcomp to prepare to match.
| |
1.3.2 Flags for POSIX Regular Expressions | Syntax variations for regcomp .
| |
1.3.3 Matching a Compiled POSIX Regular Expression | Using regexec to match the compiled
pattern that you get from regcomp .
| |
1.3.4 Match Results with Subexpressions | Finding which parts of the string were matched. | |
1.3.5 Complications in Subexpression Matching | Find points of which parts were matched. | |
1.3.6 POSIX Regexp Matching Cleanup | Freeing storage; reporting errors. |
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Before you can actually match a regular expression, you must compile it. This is not true compilation—it produces a special data structure, not machine instructions. But it is like ordinary compilation in that its purpose is to enable you to “execute” the pattern fast. (See section Matching a Compiled POSIX Regular Expression, for how to use the compiled regular expression for matching.)
There is a special data type for compiled regular expressions:
This type of object holds a compiled regular expression. It is actually a structure. It has just one field that your programs should look at:
re_nsub
This field holds the number of parenthetical subexpressions in the regular expression that was compiled.
There are several other fields, but we don’t describe them here, because only the functions in the library should use them.
After you create a regex_t
object, you can compile a regular
expression into it by calling regcomp
.
The function regcomp
“compiles” a regular expression into a
data structure that you can use with regexec
to match against a
string. The compiled regular expression format is designed for
efficient matching. regcomp
stores it into *compiled
.
It’s up to you to allocate an object of type regex_t
and pass its
address to regcomp
.
The argument cflags lets you specify various options that control the syntax and semantics of regular expressions. See section Flags for POSIX Regular Expressions.
If you use the flag REG_NOSUB
, then regcomp
omits from
the compiled regular expression the information necessary to record
how subexpressions actually match. In this case, you might as well
pass 0
for the matchptr and nmatch arguments when
you call regexec
.
If you don’t use REG_NOSUB
, then the compiled regular expression
does have the capacity to record how subexpressions match. Also,
regcomp
tells you how many subexpressions pattern has, by
storing the number in compiled->re_nsub
. You can use that
value to decide how long an array to allocate to hold information about
subexpression matches.
regcomp
returns 0
if it succeeds in compiling the regular
expression; otherwise, it returns a nonzero error code (see the table
below). You can use regerror
to produce an error message string
describing the reason for a nonzero value; see POSIX Regexp Matching Cleanup.
Here are the possible nonzero values that regcomp
can return:
REG_BADBR
There was an invalid ‘\{…\}’ construct in the regular expression. A valid ‘\{…\}’ construct must contain either a single number, or two numbers in increasing order separated by a comma.
REG_BADPAT
There was a syntax error in the regular expression.
REG_BADRPT
A repetition operator such as ‘?’ or ‘*’ appeared in a bad position (with no preceding subexpression to act on).
REG_ECOLLATE
The regular expression referred to an invalid collating element (one not defined in the current locale for string collation). @xref{Locale Categories}.
REG_ECTYPE
The regular expression referred to an invalid character class name.
REG_EESCAPE
The regular expression ended with ‘\’.
REG_ESUBREG
There was an invalid number in the ‘\digit’ construct.
REG_EBRACK
There were unbalanced square brackets in the regular expression.
REG_EPAREN
An extended regular expression had unbalanced parentheses, or a basic regular expression had unbalanced ‘\(’ and ‘\)’.
REG_EBRACE
The regular expression had unbalanced ‘\{’ and ‘\}’.
REG_ERANGE
One of the endpoints in a range expression was invalid.
REG_ESPACE
regcomp
ran out of memory.
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These are the bit flags that you can use in the cflags operand when
compiling a regular expression with regcomp
.
REG_EXTENDED
Treat the pattern as an extended regular expression, rather than as a basic regular expression.
REG_ICASE
Ignore case when matching letters.
REG_NOSUB
Don’t bother storing the contents of the matches_ptr array.
REG_NEWLINE
Treat a newline in string as dividing string into multiple lines, so that ‘$’ can match before the newline and ‘^’ can match after. Also, don’t permit ‘.’ to match a newline, and don’t permit ‘[^…]’ to match a newline.
Otherwise, newline acts like any other ordinary character.
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Once you have compiled a regular expression, as described in POSIX Regular Expression Compilation, you can match it against strings using
regexec
. A match anywhere inside the string counts as success,
unless the regular expression contains anchor characters (‘^’ or
‘$’).
This function tries to match the compiled regular expression
*compiled
against string.
regexec
returns 0
if the regular expression matches;
otherwise, it returns a nonzero value. See the table below for
what nonzero values mean. You can use regerror
to produce an
error message string describing the reason for a nonzero value;
see POSIX Regexp Matching Cleanup.
The argument eflags is a word of bit flags that enable various options.
If you want to get information about what part of string actually
matched the regular expression or its subexpressions, use the arguments
matchptr and nmatch. Otherwise, pass 0
for
nmatch, and NULL
for matchptr. See section Match Results with Subexpressions.
You must match the regular expression with the same set of current locales that were in effect when you compiled the regular expression.
The function regexec
accepts the following flags in the
eflags argument:
REG_NOTBOL
Do not regard the beginning of the specified string as the beginning of a line; more generally, don’t make any assumptions about what text might precede it.
REG_NOTEOL
Do not regard the end of the specified string as the end of a line; more generally, don’t make any assumptions about what text might follow it.
Here are the possible nonzero values that regexec
can return:
REG_NOMATCH
The pattern didn’t match the string. This isn’t really an error.
REG_ESPACE
regexec
ran out of memory.
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When regexec
matches parenthetical subexpressions of
pattern, it records which parts of string they match. It
returns that information by storing the offsets into an array whose
elements are structures of type regmatch_t
. The first element of
the array (index 0
) records the part of the string that matched
the entire regular expression. Each other element of the array records
the beginning and end of the part that matched a single parenthetical
subexpression.
This is the data type of the matcharray array that you pass to
regexec
. It containes two structure fields, as follows:
rm_so
The offset in string of the beginning of a substring. Add this value to string to get the address of that part.
rm_eo
The offset in string of the end of the substring.
regoff_t
is an alias for another signed integer type.
The fields of regmatch_t
have type regoff_t
.
The regmatch_t
elements correspond to subexpressions
positionally; the first element (index 1
) records where the first
subexpression matched, the second element records the second
subexpression, and so on. The order of the subexpressions is the order
in which they begin.
When you call regexec
, you specify how long the matchptr
array is, with the nmatch argument. This tells regexec
how
many elements to store. If the actual regular expression has more than
nmatch subexpressions, then you won’t get offset information about
the rest of them. But this doesn’t alter whether the pattern matches a
particular string or not.
If you don’t want regexec
to return any information about where
the subexpressions matched, you can either supply 0
for
nmatch, or use the flag REG_NOSUB
when you compile the
pattern with regcomp
.
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Sometimes a subexpression matches a substring of no characters. This
happens when ‘f\(o*\)’ matches the string ‘fum’. (It really
matches just the ‘f’.) In this case, both of the offsets identify
the point in the string where the null substring was found. In this
example, the offsets are both 1
.
Sometimes the entire regular expression can match without using some of
its subexpressions at all—for example, when ‘ba\(na\)*’ matches the
string ‘ba’, the parenthetical subexpression is not used. When
this happens, regexec
stores -1
in both fields of the
element for that subexpression.
Sometimes matching the entire regular expression can match a particular
subexpression more than once—for example, when ‘ba\(na\)*’
matches the string ‘bananana’, the parenthetical subexpression
matches three times. When this happens, regexec
usually stores
the offsets of the last part of the string that matched the
subexpression. In the case of ‘bananana’, these offsets are
6
and 8
.
But the last match is not always the one that is chosen. It’s more
accurate to say that the last opportunity to match is the one
that takes precedence. What this means is that when one subexpression
appears within another, then the results reported for the inner
subexpression reflect whatever happened on the last match of the outer
subexpression. For an example, consider ‘\(ba\(na\)*s \)*’ matching
the string ‘bananas bas ’. The last time the inner expression
actually matches is near the end of the first word. But it is
considered again in the second word, and fails to match there.
regexec
reports nonuse of the “na” subexpression.
Another place where this rule applies is when the regular expression
‘\(ba\(na\)*s \|nefer\(ti\)* \)*’ matches ‘bananas nefertiti’.
The “na” subexpression does match in the first word, but it doesn’t
match in the second word because the other alternative is used there.
Once again, the second repetition of the outer subexpression overrides
the first, and within that second repetition, the “na” subexpression
is not used. So regexec
reports nonuse of the “na”
subexpression.
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When you are finished using a compiled regular expression, you can
free the storage it uses by calling regfree
.
Calling regfree
frees all the storage that *compiled
points to. This includes various internal fields of the regex_t
structure that aren’t documented in this manual.
regfree
does not free the object *compiled
itself.
You should always free the space in a regex_t
structure with
regfree
before using the structure to compile another regular
expression.
When regcomp
or regexec
reports an error, you can use
the function regerror
to turn it into an error message string.
This function produces an error message string for the error code
errcode, and stores the string in length bytes of memory
starting at buffer. For the compiled argument, supply the
same compiled regular expression structure that regcomp
or
regexec
was working with when it got the error. Alternatively,
you can supply NULL
for compiled; you will still get a
meaningful error message, but it might not be as detailed.
If the error message can’t fit in length bytes (including a
terminating null character), then regerror
truncates it.
The string that regerror
stores is always null-terminated
even if it has been truncated.
The return value of regerror
is the minimum length needed to
store the entire error message. If this is less than length, then
the error message was not truncated, and you can use it. Otherwise, you
should call regerror
again with a larger buffer.
Here is a function which uses regerror
, but always dynamically
allocates a buffer for the error message:
char *get_regerror (int errcode, regex_t *compiled) { size_t length = regerror (errcode, compiled, NULL, 0); char *buffer = xmalloc (length); (void) regerror (errcode, compiled, buffer, length); return buffer; }
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Word expansion means the process of splitting a string into words and substituting for variables, commands, and wildcards just as the shell does.
For example, when you write ‘ls -l foo.c’, this string is split into three separate words—‘ls’, ‘-l’ and ‘foo.c’. This is the most basic function of word expansion.
When you write ‘ls *.c’, this can become many words, because the word ‘*.c’ can be replaced with any number of file names. This is called wildcard expansion, and it is also a part of word expansion.
When you use ‘echo $PATH’ to print your path, you are taking advantage of variable substitution, which is also part of word expansion.
Ordinary programs can perform word expansion just like the shell by
calling the library function wordexp
.
1.4.1 The Stages of Word Expansion | What word expansion does to a string. | |
1.4.2 Calling wordexp | How to call wordexp .
| |
1.4.3 Flags for Word Expansion | Options you can enable in wordexp .
| |
1.4.4 wordexp Example | A sample program that does word expansion. |
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When word expansion is applied to a sequence of words, it performs the following transformations in the order shown here:
For the details of these transformations, and how to write the constructs that use them, see The BASH Manual (to appear).
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wordexp
All the functions, constants and data types for word expansion are declared in the header file ‘wordexp.h’.
Word expansion produces a vector of words (strings). To return this
vector, wordexp
uses a special data type, wordexp_t
, which
is a structure. You pass wordexp
the address of the structure,
and it fills in the structure’s fields to tell you about the results.
This data type holds a pointer to a word vector. More precisely, it records both the address of the word vector and its size.
we_wordc
The number of elements in the vector.
we_wordv
The address of the vector. This field has type char **
.
we_offs
The offset of the first real element of the vector, from its nominal
address in the we_wordv
field. Unlike the other fields, this
is always an input to wordexp
, rather than an output from it.
If you use a nonzero offset, then that many elements at the beginning of
the vector are left empty. (The wordexp
function fills them with
null pointers.)
The we_offs
field is meaningful only if you use the
WRDE_DOOFFS
flag. Otherwise, the offset is always zero
regardless of what is in this field, and the first real element comes at
the beginning of the vector.
Perform word expansion on the string words, putting the result in
a newly allocated vector, and store the size and address of this vector
into *word-vector-ptr
. The argument flags is a
combination of bit flags; see Flags for Word Expansion, for details of
the flags.
You shouldn’t use any of the characters ‘|&;<>’ in the string
words unless they are quoted; likewise for newline. If you use
these characters unquoted, you will get the WRDE_BADCHAR
error
code. Don’t use parentheses or braces unless they are quoted or part of
a word expansion construct. If you use quotation characters ‘'"`’,
they should come in pairs that balance.
The results of word expansion are a sequence of words. The function
wordexp
allocates a string for each resulting word, then
allocates a vector of type char **
to store the addresses of
these strings. The last element of the vector is a null pointer.
This vector is called the word vector.
To return this vector, wordexp
stores both its address and its
length (number of elements, not counting the terminating null pointer)
into *word-vector-ptr
.
If wordexp
succeeds, it returns 0. Otherwise, it returns one
of these error codes:
WRDE_BADCHAR
The input string words contains an unquoted invalid character such as ‘|’.
WRDE_BADVAL
The input string refers to an undefined shell variable, and you used the flag
WRDE_UNDEF
to forbid such references.
WRDE_CMDSUB
The input string uses command substitution, and you used the flag
WRDE_NOCMD
to forbid command substitution.
WRDE_NOSPACE
It was impossible to allocate memory to hold the result. In this case,
wordexp
can store part of the results—as much as it could
allocate room for.
WRDE_SYNTAX
There was a syntax error in the input string. For example, an unmatched quoting character is a syntax error.
Free the storage used for the word-strings and vector that
*word-vector-ptr
points to. This does not free the
structure *word-vector-ptr
itself—only the other
data it points to.
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This section describes the flags that you can specify in the
flags argument to wordexp
. Choose the flags you want,
and combine them with the C operator |
.
WRDE_APPEND
Append the words from this expansion to the vector of words produced by
previous calls to wordexp
. This way you can effectively expand
several words as if they were concatenated with spaces between them.
In order for appending to work, you must not modify the contents of the
word vector structure between calls to wordexp
. And, if you set
WRDE_DOOFFS
in the first call to wordexp
, you must also
set it when you append to the results.
WRDE_DOOFFS
Leave blank slots at the beginning of the vector of words.
The we_offs
field says how many slots to leave.
The blank slots contain null pointers.
WRDE_NOCMD
Don’t do command substitution; if the input requests command substitution, report an error.
WRDE_REUSE
Reuse a word vector made by a previous call to wordexp
.
Instead of allocating a new vector of words, this call to wordexp
will use the vector that already exists (making it larger if necessary).
Note that the vector may move, so it is not safe to save an old pointer
and use it again after calling wordexp
. You must fetch
we_pathv
anew after each call.
WRDE_SHOWERR
Do show any error messages printed by commands run by command substitution.
More precisely, allow these commands to inherit the standard error output
stream of the current process. By default, wordexp
gives these
commands a standard error stream that discards all output.
WRDE_UNDEF
If the input refers to a shell variable that is not defined, report an error.
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wordexp
ExampleHere is an example of using wordexp
to expand several strings
and use the results to run a shell command. It also shows the use of
WRDE_APPEND
to concatenate the expansions and of wordfree
to free the space allocated by wordexp
.
int
expand_and_execute (const char *program, const char *options)
{
wordexp_t result;
pid_t pid
int status, i;
/* Expand the string for the program to run. */
switch (wordexp (program, &result, 0))
{
case 0: /* Successful. */
break;
case WRDE_NOSPACE:
/* If the error was WRDE_NOSPACE
,
then perhaps part of the result was allocated. */
wordfree (&result);
default: /* Some other error. */
return -1;
}
/* Expand the strings specified for the arguments. */
for (i = 0; args[i]; i++)
{
if (wordexp (options, &result, WRDE_APPEND))
{
wordfree (&result);
return -1;
}
}
pid = fork ();
if (pid == 0)
{
/* This is the child process. Execute the command. */
execv (result.we_wordv[0], result.we_wordv);
exit (EXIT_FAILURE);
}
else if (pid < 0)
/* The fork failed. Report failure. */
status = -1;
else
/* This is the parent process. Wait for the child to complete. */
if (waitpid (pid, &status, 0) != pid)
status = -1;
wordfree (&result);
return status;
}
In practice, since wordexp
is executed by running a subshell, it
would be faster to do this by concatenating the strings with spaces
between them and running that as a shell command using ‘sh -c’.
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