[ruby-core:102120] [Ruby master Feature#17548] Need simple way to include symlink directories in Dir.glob

Issue #17548 has been updated by keithrbennett (Keith Bennett).


Please disregard my comments about the numbers of files found. They were not due to different handling of symlinks, they were due to different handling of hidden directories (e.g. `rvm`).

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Feature #17548: Need simple way to include symlink directories in Dir.glob
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17548#change-89974

* Author: keithrbennett (Keith Bennett)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
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I would like to suggest that Ruby provide a simple way to glob that includes the content of symlinked directories.

I have my Ruby projects in a `~/work` directory that is symlinked to a directory an another partition.

For example, `~` is on `/dev/sda1`, whereas `~/work` is a link to a directory on `/dev/sda2`. I need this because I want to operate on the same code bases regardless of which partition I boot from (they are various Linux distros).

The array returned by `Dir.glob(Dir.home, '**', '*rb')` does not include any files in ~/work. The size of that array is only 84. In contrast, when I use `find ~ -name "*rb" | wc -l` to get the number of files, I get 87,229 files.

I was hoping that one of the flags that can be passed to `glob` would help, but the only relevant one I found was to *not* follow links, which is the opposite of what I wanted.

There are arcane workarounds using fancy glob patterns, but I believe it's important that the language provide a simple way to accomplish this. (For example, the Unix `find` command has an `-L` option for this.) I understand that it may not be possible to retrofit it into the existing functions (`glob` and `[]`), but even providing a different method (e.g. one named `glob_include_links`) would be ok. Or perhaps a `glob2` method could be added that would include simple ways to specify that files in hidden directories should be included, in addition to the option to follow symlinks.

I admit that I have no idea how much effort this would be to implement, especially regarding Windows compatibility, but this would be nice to have.




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