Do you use bash 4.0 or newer? (You probably do. Type ‘bash –version’ in your terminal to find out).

If so, you could be living a better life.

Globstar is a feature not typically enabled, but present in bash 4+, and it allows you to do more easily select files in bash, using a double star **.

For example, if you want to every .text file, in all subdirectories, you no longer even need to use the find command.

ls **/*.text

The ** here will traverse any number of directories, not just the current directory. Here’s another very useful, easy to remember example. Ever want to find a line of text somewhere in a huge pile of files, but you know some part of the file name? You can do a recursive grep to easily find it, without some abstruse find command.

grep -r needle **/*haystack*

To begin using globstar, you need to enable it. It should be the default, if you ask me, but enabling is simple. From the terminal, type:

shopt -s globstar

You’ll probably want to add that line to your ~/.bashrc file, too, so it’s enabled every time you open a terminal or login.

Happy Globbing!