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Globbing, or filename globbing, is a pattern matching facility used by shells and programming languages to expand non-specific pathspecs into a list of matching filesystem paths. It relies on wildcard characters rather than regular expressions to select names.

Common patterns include the asterisk (*) which matches any string of characters within a single directory level, the question mark (?) which matches a single character, and character classes in brackets such as [abc] which match any one of the characters in the set. Negated classes like [!abc] exclude certain characters. Some shells support extended patterns and recursive matching with features such as ** (globstar) when enabled, and brace expansion like {foo,bar} is often available as related syntax but not universally part of globbing.

Examples of use: in a Unix shell, ls *.txt lists all files ending in .txt in the current directory. In Python, the glob module uses the same syntax and can be used as glob.glob('src/**/*.py', recursive=True). In Windows command shells, wildcards * and ? are used to filter directory listings or file operations, depending on the context and command.

Origin and scope: the term globbing comes from the glob() function in early Unix systems, which performed pathname pattern expansion. Globbing is distinct from regular expressions in its focus on filename expansion; it is generally simpler and more portable but less expressive.

See also: comparison with regular expressions; language-specific implementations of glob patterns; recursive globbing features.