Question

I want to retrieve all the matching paths following this pattern in a vector<string>:

"/some/path/img*.png"

How can I simply do that ?

Answer 1

I have that in my gist. I created a stl wrapper around glob so that it returns vector of string and take care of freeing glob result. Not exactly very efficient but this code is a little more readable and some would say easier to use.

#include <glob.h> // glob(), globfree()
#include <string.h> // memset()
#include <vector>
#include <stdexcept>
#include <string>
#include <sstream>

std::vector<std::string> glob(const std::string& pattern) {
    using namespace std;

    // glob struct resides on the stack
    glob_t glob_result;
    memset(&glob_result, 0, sizeof(glob_result));

    // do the glob operation
    int return_value = glob(pattern.c_str(), GLOB_TILDE, NULL, &glob_result);
    if(return_value != 0) {
        globfree(&glob_result);
        stringstream ss;
        ss << "glob() failed with return_value " << return_value << endl;
        throw std::runtime_error(ss.str());
    }

    // collect all the filenames into a std::list<std::string>
    vector<string> filenames;
    for(size_t i = 0; i < glob_result.gl_pathc; ++i) {
        filenames.push_back(string(glob_result.gl_pathv[i]));
    }

    // cleanup
    globfree(&glob_result);

    // done
    return filenames;
}