vsi_glob: Get file and directory names matching a pattern that may...

In gdalraster: Bindings to 'GDAL'

Get file and directory names matching a pattern that may contain wildcards

Description

vsi_glob() returns a character vector of file and directory names matching a pattern that can contain wildcards. This function has similar behavior to the POSIX glob() function. Wrapper of VSIGlob() in the GDAL Common Portability Library. Requires GDAL >= 3.11.

Usage

vsi_glob(pattern, show_progress = FALSE)

Arguments

pattern	Character string. The relative or absolute path of a directory to read, potentially containing wildcards, assumed to be UTF-8 encoded (see Details).
show_progress	Logical scalar. If TRUE, a progress bar will be displayed. Default is FALSE.

Details

The following wildcards are supported

• *: match any string

• ⁠?⁠: match any single character

• [: match character class or range, with ! immediately after [ to indicate negation

Refer to to the glob() man page for more details (https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/glob.7.html). It also supports the ⁠**⁠ recursive wildcard, behaving similarly to Python glob.glob() with recursive = True. Be careful of the amount of memory and time required when using the recursive wildcard on directories with a large amount of files and subdirectories.

Examples, given a file hierarchy:

• one.tif

• my_subdir/two.tif

• my_subdir/subsubdir/three.tif

vsi_glob("one.tif")
  # returns ("one.tif")
vsi_glob("*.tif")
  # returns ("one.tif")
vsi_glob("on?.tif")
  # returns ("one.tif")
vsi_glob("on[a-z].tif")
  # returns ("one.tif")
vsi_glob("on[ef].tif")
  # returns ("one.tif")
vsi_glob("on[!e].tif")
  # returns empty vector character()
vsi_glob("my_subdir/*.tif")
  # returns ("my_subdir/two.tif")
vsi_glob("**/*.tif") returns
  # returns ("one.tif", "my_subdir/two.tif", "my_subdir/subsubdir/three.tif")

In the current implementation, matching is done based on the assumption that a character fits into a single byte, which will not work properly on non-ASCII UTF-8 filenames.

Value

A character vector containing the matching names of files and directories.

Note

GDAL's VSIGlob() works with any virtual file systems supported by GDAL, including network file systems such as /vsis3/, /vsigs/, /vsiaz/, etc. But note that for those, the pattern is not passed to the remote server, and thus a large amount of filenames can be transferred from the remote server to the host where the filtering is done.

See Also

vsi_read_dir()

Examples

# Requires GDAL >= 3.11
data_dir <- system.file("extdata", package="gdalraster")
vsi_glob(file.path(data_dir, "ynp*"))

gdalraster documentation built on March 25, 2026, 9:07 a.m.