Awesome

globby

globby is a .gitignore-style file globber for ruby.

Installation

Put gem 'globby' in your Gemfile.

Usage

# all files matched by the rules
Globby.select(rules)

# all other files
Globby.reject(rules)

# ooh chaining!
Globby.select(rules).reject(other_rules)

An example:

 > rules = File.read('.gitignore').split(/\n/)
-> ["Gemfile.lock", "doc", "*.gem"]

 > pp Globby.select(rules)
["Gemfile.lock",
 "doc/Foreigner.html",
 "doc/Foreigner/Adapter.html",
 "doc/Gemfile.html",
 "doc/Immigrant.html",
 ...
 "immigrant-0.1.3.gem",
 "immigrant-0.1.4.gem"]
=> nil

Why on earth would I ever use this?

You're curious what is getting .gitignore'd and/or you want to do something with those files.
You're writing a library/tool that will have its own list of ignored/tracked files. My use case is for an I18n library that extracts strings from ruby files... I need to provide users a nice configurable way to blacklist given files/directories/patterns.

Compatibility Notes

globby is compatible with .gitignore rules; it respects negated patterns, and ignores comments or empty patterns. That said, it supports some things that may or may not work in your version of git. These platform-dependent .gitignore behaviors are platform independent in globby and can always be used:

Recursive wildcards à la ant/zsh/ruby. ** matches directories recursively.
glob(7)-style bracket expressions, i.e. character classes, ranges, complementation, named character classes, collating symbols and equivalence class expressions. Note that the syntax for some of these is slightly different than what you would find in regular expressions. Refer to the documentation for more info.