Is there a way to glob a directory in Ruby but exclude certain directories?

Question

I want to glob a directory to post-process header files. Yet I want to exclude some directories in the project. Right now the default way is...

Dir["**/*.h"].each { |header|     puts header } 

Seems inefficient to check each header entry manually if it's in an excluded directory.

Answer 1

I know this is 4 years late but for anybody else that might run across this question you can exclude from Dir the same way you would exclude from Bash wildcards:

Dir["lib/{[!errors/]**/*,*}.rb"] 

Which will exclude any folder that starts with "errors" you could even omit the / and turn it into a wildcard of sorts too if you want.

Answer 2

Don't use globbing, instead use Find. Find is designed to give you access to the directories and files as they're encountered, and you programmatically decide when to bail out of a directory and go to the next. See the example on the doc page.

If you want to continue using globbing this will give you a starting place. You can put multiple tests in reject or'd together:

Dir['**/*.h'].reject{ |f| f['/path/to/skip'] || f[%r{^/another/path/to/skip}] }.each do |filename|   puts filename end 

You can use either fixed-strings or regex in the tests.