[Python-Dev] PEP 428 - pathlib API questions (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Nov 25 00:06:59 CET 2013

Ben Hoyt wrote:

However, it seems there was no further discussion about why not "extension" and "extensions"? I have never heard a filename extension being called a "suffix".

You can't have read many unix man pages, then! I just searched for "suffix" in the gcc man page, and found this:

 For any given input file, the file name suffix determines what kind of
 compilation is done:

I know it is a suffix in the sense of the English word, but I've never heard it called that in this context, and I think context is important.

This probably depends on your background. In my experience, the term "extension" arose in OSes where it was a formal part of the filename syntax, often highly constrained. E.g. RT11, CP/M, early MS-DOS.

Unix has never had a formal notion of extensions like that, only informal conventions, and has called them suffixes at least some of the time for as long as I can remember.

4) Is pathobj.glob() recursive? In the PEP it looks like it is if the pattern starts with '**',

I don't think it has to start with **. Rather, the ** is a pattern that can span directory separators. It's not a flag that applies to the whole thing -- a pattern could have a * in one place and a ** in another.

-- Greg

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