Allowing wildcards in Find file prompt that resolve to a single file?

Allowing wildcards in Find file prompt that resolve to a single file?

[Ludwig, Mark]

Has anyone made an enhancement or extension that would let a user
specify wildcard(s) in the Find file prompt, as long as the
wildcard(s) resolve to a single file?

The reason I want this is because we have numerous files that
have uniqueness at the tail end (which is why TAB doesn't help).

Consider, for example, that there might be only file in each
directory that ends with ".foo" (made-up example).  I would enter
"dir1/dir2/*.foo" at the Find file prompt and have it find the
one ".foo" file in dir2.  (The file name before ".foo" is a
mangling of "dir1" and "dir2" for historical reasons.)

Hope this makes sense,

Mark Ludwig
Lifecycle Coll
Product Lifecycle Management

Siemens Industry Sector
Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc.
5939 Rice Creek Parkway
Shoreview, MN  55126 United States
Tel.      :+1 (651) 855-6140
Fax      :+1 (651) 855-6280
ludwig.mark@siemens.com <ludwig.mark@siemens.com%20>
www.siemens.com/plm

Re: Allowing wildcards in Find file prompt that resolve to a single file?

[Glenn Morris]

"Ludwig, Mark" wrote:

> The reason I want this is because we have numerous files that
> have uniqueness at the tail end (which is why TAB doesn't help).

TAB works for me:

touch foo.bar foo.qux

emacs-24.3 -Q
C-x C-f .bar TAB    -> foo.bar

RE: Allowing wildcards in Find file prompt that resolve to a single file?

[Drew Adams]

> Has anyone made an enhancement or extension that would let a user
> specify wildcard(s) in the Find file prompt, as long as the
> wildcard(s) resolve to a single file?
> 
> The reason I want this is because we have numerous files that
> have uniqueness at the tail end (which is why TAB doesn't help).
> 
> Consider, for example, that there might be only file in each
> directory that ends with ".foo" (made-up example).  I would enter
> "dir1/dir2/*.foo" at the Find file prompt and have it find the
> one ".foo" file in dir2.  (The file name before ".foo" is a
> mangling of "dir1" and "dir2" for historical reasons.)

This is already the case.

C-x C-f dir1/dir2/*.foo RET

opens all files that match the glob pattern *.foo in that directory.
If there is only one such file, then it is the only one visited.

(Do not confuse glob-pattern matching with TAB-completion pattern
matching.)