GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 586125
regular expression search feature
Last modified: 2021-06-18 15:28:55 UTC
add a checkbox for 'regular expression' and 'case sensitive search'. -when the 'regular expression' checkbox is checked, the search string is interpreted as a regular expression string. -when 'case sensitive search' checkbox is checked. the results are not filtered based on case.
case sensitive search is covered by bug 345046 already, hence making this only about RegEx support.
*** Bug 690478 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 699463 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
To be clear, this request is really for what's usually called filename globbing (e.g. searching for '*.xml', or 'foo.*'). Strictly speaking filename globs are not regular expressions (the regular expression 'foo.*' will match 'foo.....' but not 'foo.xml'). Note that the Select Items Matching dialog in Nautilus does already support globbing.
Pedantic side note, irrelevant to this feature request: actually the regexp 'foo.*' will match 'foo.xml', but not for the same reasons that the glob 'foo.*' will. The regexp 'foo.* will also match 'foofoo'.
As I pointed out in comment 4 above this is actually a request for filename globbing, not full regular expression matching. Could someone change the title of this bug to reflect that (since I have no permission to do so myself)?
I see nothing in the original request that indicates this is about globbing. It is bad form to repurpose bug reports.
I'm quite certain the original request was for filename globbing. The original poster was surely talking about matching filenames (Nautilus has never searched file content as far as I'm aware). And I've never heard of any program anywhere that uses actual regular expressions for filename matching; in UNIX-land that always happens via a glob. But nevertheless we could certainly close this and reopen a more clearly worded feature request. Jon, would that be your preference?
Yes if the request is for something other than regex selection / search of filenames then a new bug would be best.
OK - I created bug 703356 "allow file search to match globbing patterns such as '*.png' ". Given that, I recommend marking this bug as WONTFIX. As Andre mentioned in comment 1 above, this bug is only about regular expression matching (case sensitivity is covered by a different bug). I think it would be quite unusual to use actual regular expressions to match filenames - I'm not aware of any GNOME or Unix program that does so.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Files (nautilus), then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.