wildpath

A rust library, CLI, and WASM component to resolve wildcards in filepaths on UNIX systems and WASM runtimes.

The library exposes one method, resolve, which will take a filepath with wildcards (&std::fs::Path) and return everything on the filesystem that fits the given description (Vec<std::fs::PathBuf>).

wildpath operates using rust standard library methods for examining the file system in stf::fs, avoiding the potential security risks with directly running ls as a shell command using user input with std::process.

For example, consider a file system that looks like the following:

root
├── blogs
│   ├── blog_1
│   │   ├── assets
│   │   │   └── logo.jpeg
│   │   └── post.txt
│   └── blog_2
│       ├── assets
│       │   └── research_notes.txt
│       └── post.txt
└── videos
    ├── video_1
    │   ├── assets
    │   │   └── logo.jpeg
    │   └── script.txt
    ├── video_2
    │   ├── assets
    │   │   └── sound_effect.wav
    │   └── script.txt
    └── video_3
        ├── assets
        │   └── new_logo.png
        └── script.txt

Using the library, if you want to find all of the text for the content you can call

resolve(&Path::new("/root/*/*/*.txt").unwrap())

which will return all of the txt files that are 3 layers deep:

[
    "/root/blogs/blog_1/post.txt",
    "/root/blogs/blog_2/post.txt",
    "/root/videos/video_1/script.txt",
    "/root/videos/video_2/script.txt",
    "/root/videos/video_3/script.txt"
]

If you want to see all of the versions of logos that have been used, you can call

resolve(&Path::new("/root/*/*/assets/*logo*").unwrap())

which will return

[
    "/root/blogs/blog_1/assets/logo.jpeg",
    "/root/videos/video_1/assets/logo.jpeg",
    "/root/videos/video_3/assets/new_logo.png"
]

Or if you want to see the logos used for the original blog and video, you can call

resolve(&Path::new("/root/*/*_1/assets/*logo*").unwrap())

which will return

[
    "/root/blogs/blog_1/assets/logo.jpeg",
    "/root/videos/video_1/assets/logo.jpeg"
]

and if you add a new directory called presentations, as long as it follows the same structure as the others, this same line of code will also pick up the logo used in the first presentation.

Symlinks

wildpath will also follow symlinks and resolve. For example, if you have the following filesystem:

root
├── A
│   └── X (<- symlink to B)
└── B
    └── c.png

and pass a path of /root/A/*/*, you will receive [/root/B/c.png] as the output.

wildpath-cli

The library has also ben wrapped in a CLI tool you can install, wildpath-cli. You can run the first example in the README by running

wildpath-cli "/root/*/*/*.txt"

Yes - this is just worse ls. It mostly exits to facilitate the following:

WASM

The wildpath-cli binary has also been built with the wasm32-wasi target and deployed to the Wasmer registry. It can be invoked with

wasmer run matyasz/wildpath-cli "/wh*tever/path/y*u/want/"

Limitations

• wildpath has only been tested on a UNIX system and the Wasmer WASM runtime. For now, it may not work on Windows.
• Paths need to be in quotes.
• It will also not respect . or .. in a path. For now, these will need to be resolved prior to using the library.