Cannot use wildcard to test multiple files at once on Windows

[denismaier]

Hi,
testing multiple files at once does not work as expected on Windows (tested on powershell and cmd):

Using git bash the above syntax works perfectly. Don't know if this is an issue with powershell and cmd, or if this related to modish, or a combination of both...

[nchachereau]

I'm afraid I'm quite unfamiliar with the Windows command line (been on Linux for the past 15 or even 20 years). Apparently, unlike Unix shells, the Windows shell * does not expand the wildcard before passing the arguments to the command. So that modish gets the string 'tests/*.yml' instead of several arguments, each pointing to one test file.

I cannot test right now, but maybe something like the following works in Powershell?

modish test (dir tests/*.yml) -- or maybe modish test (dir tests/*.yml).FullName

(Of course, note that for that specific example one can simply run modish test to run all tests files in YAML in the tests/ directory.)

I will have to decide whether modish should expand wildcards itself when it gets strings that do not match existing files. Not so sure what the best course of action is.

[nchachereau]

Oh, and I changed the title of this issue because modish test tests/actual_file.yml tests/other_file.yml tests/third_file.yml should work (i.e. explicitly passing the different files, without using a wildcard). Could you confirm this?

[denismaier]

Yes, that works as expected.

[denismaier]

Apparently, there a multiple javascript packages that take care of wildcard patterns, e.g. glob

Some notes on usage

[nchachereau]

We would not even have to depend on an external package, but could use expandGlob from Deno's @std/fs.

What I am unsure about is when we should expand the input:

• whenever the OS is Windows?
• when trying to read a test file raises an OS Error 123? (Can we test for that?)
• combining the previous two cases? (but error 123 is probably only ever raised on Windows anyway)
• some other case?

[denismaier]

What speaks against doing this always? Any possible drawbacks?

[nchachereau]

Well, it is perfectly valid for a filename in Unix to include wildcard characters such as * or ?. In your shell, if you write modish test tests/book*.yml, this then gets expanded by the shell (modish would then get, say, the list of files tests/book1.yml tests/book2.yml tests/book*.yml. If instead you quote the input, the shell does not expand it, and you expect the program to receive that exact argument (modish test 'tests/book*.yml').

Expanding in every case would thus introduce bugs for people on Linux or MacOS.

(Note: naming a file book*.yml might seem unlikely, but including ? or [...] in a filename is actually not that uncommon, for instance, for an epub of a book that has a question mark in its title.)

[denismaier]

Ok, I see. The glob package claims to behave just like the shell would. It shouldn't make a difference whether the shell expands the wildcards or if expansion is done during processing. Is it possible to check whether the argument is quoted?

[nchachereau]

Note to self: this is a common problem (see e.g. pallets/click#1096 and BurntSushi/ripgrep#234).

Easiest way is probably to do it the way Click does it, i.e. always expand on Windows systems. I will implement the fix soon.