Question

What does ** mean in a regular expression, I’m looking at the following piece of code:

def coffee2js
  coffee_folder = self.config['coffeescript_folder'] || '**/*.coffee'
  compile_coffeescript(["*.coffee", coffee_folder], /\.coffee$/, '.js')
end

Isn’t saying **/*.coffee the same as saying */*.coffee?

Answer 1

This is not a regex, this is syntax of globbing.

This expression

Dir.glob('/some/dir/**/*.coffee')

finds all .coffee files under /some/dir in all directories recursively (as opposed to looking only at /some/dir and not going into nested dirs).