I'd like to start a discussion on including a file system globbing API in .NET (Core). If you look at implementations mentioned on Wikipedia, every "mainstream platform" has an entry, but not .NET.

There's quite a few (more or less) successful implementations around (see below), some even from Microsoft, but I think something as fundamental as this, should ship with the framework.

There's already partial globbing support using the following methods

• Directory.GetFiles
• Directory.EnumerateFiles
• Directory.GetFileSystemEntries
• Directory.EnumerateFileSystemEntries
• Directory.GetDirectories
• Directory.EnumerateDirectories

They all have a searchPattern argument, but it lacks support for recursive globs (** aka. "globstar"), brace expansion etc. This can be achieved using the SearchOption argument, but the API is hard to use when you want to support (often user-defined) recursive patterns like /src/**/*.csproj.

I'd ❤️ to hear people's opinions here...

• Is it worth including in the framework?
• Should new APIs be introduced, or can we "level up" the existing searchPattern in the methods mentioned above (without it being a breaking change)?

Examples

• MSBuild by @cdmihai
• Cake by @patriksvensson
• Minimatch (port from JS) by @SLaks
• Microsoft.Extensions.FileSystemGlobbing by @troydai
• Glob by @kthompson

And tons of other implementations...