How to use globstar on bash older than v4

Question

We use this command to run all tests using mocha: mocha ./src/test/**/*.js --recursive

Notice the double **. It works fine on any modern bash, except on the CI system which is a RedHat with GNU bash, version 3.2.25(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu).

I read that v3 does not support double globstar.

• I tried to enable it by executing shopt -s globstar
  • but failed saying shopt: globstar: invalid shell option name.
• I asked the client's devops to update the bash
  • but he said "it doesn't show me that a new version of bash is available".
• This other answer was not helpful.

Question: How can I execute a command with ** on a linux bash v3.*? Any workaround?

Answer 1

If it doesn't support globstar, then it doesn't support it.

However, most of the time you can adapt find, xargs, and/or similar tools. Your case is pretty simple, with everything under one directory, so:

find src/test -name "*.js" -exec mocha --recursive {} +

find src/test -name "*.js" -print | xargs -d '\n' mocha --recursive

(find puts the filenames in place of {}, and xargs appends them to the end. So in both cases, the repeated arguments must go at the end after all the --options, but that shouldn't be a problem for most programs.)

Alternatively, if running mocha once for every file is okay, then:

find src/test -name "*.js" -exec mocha {} --recursive \;

Compare -exec … \; (one file at a time) and the earlier -exec … + (as many as possible).

Note: In all above examples, the "*.js" has to be quoted because you want find to process it, not the shell.