*  the compiler that built your Fossil executable
 *  whether you are running the command interactively
 *  whether the command is built against a runtime system that does this
    at all
 *  whether the Fossil command is being run from a file named `*.BAT` vs
    being named `*.CMD`

Usually (but not always!) the C runtime library that your `fossil.exe`
executable is built against does this glob expansion on Windows so the
program proper does not have to. This may then interact with the way the
Windows command shell you’re using handles argument quoting. Because of
these differences, it is common to find perfectly valid Fossil command
examples that were written and tested on a POSIX system which then fail
when tried on Windows.



The most common problem is figuring out how to get a glob pattern passed
on the command line into `fossil.exe` without it being expanded by the C
runtime library that your particular Fossil executable is linked to,
which tries to act like [the POSIX systems described above](#posix). Windows is
not strongly governed by POSIX, so it has not historically hewed closely
to its strictures.

For example, consider how you would set `crlf-glob` to `*` in order to
get normal Windows text files with CR+LF line endings past Fossil's
"looks like a binary file" check. The naïve approach will not work:

    C:\...> fossil setting crlf-glob *

The C runtime library will expand that to the list of all files in the
current directory, which will probably cause a Fossil error because
Fossil expects either nothing or option flags after the setting's new
value, not a list of file names. (To be fair, the same thing will happen
on POSIX systems, only at the shell level, before `.../bin/fossil` even
gets run by the shell.)

Let's try again:

    C:\...> fossil setting crlf-glob '*'

Quoting the argument like that will work reliably on POSIX, but it may
or may not work on Windows. If your Windows command shell interprets the
quotes, it means `fossil.exe` will see only the bare `*` so the C
runtime library it is linked to will likely expand the list of files in
the current directory before the `setting` command gets a chance to
parse the command line arguments, causing the same failure as above.
This alternative only works if you’re using a Windows command shell that
passes the quotes through to the executable *and* you have linked Fossil
to a C runtime library that interprets the quotes properly itself,
resulting in a bare `*` getting clear down to Fossil’s `setting` command

parser.

An approach that *will* work reliably is:

    C:\...> echo * | fossil setting crlf-glob --args -

This works because the built-in Windows command `echo` does not expand its
arguments, and the `--args -` option makes Fossil read further command
arguments from its standard input, which is connected to the output
of `echo` by the pipe. (`-` is a common Unix convention meaning
"standard input," which Fossil obeys.) A [batch script][fng.cmd] to automate this trick was
posted on the now-inactive Fossil Mailing List.

[fng.cmd]: https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org/msg25099.html

(Ironically, this method will *not* work on POSIX systems because it is
not up to the command to expand globs. The shell will expand the `*` in
the `echo` command, so the list of file names will be passed to the
`fossil` standard input, just as with the first example above!)

Another (usually) correct approach which will work on both Windows and
POSIX systems:

    C:\...> fossil setting crlf-glob *,

This works because the trailing comma prevents the glob pattern from
matching any files, unless you happen to have files named with a
trailing comma in the current directory. If the pattern matches no
files, it is passed into Fossil's `main()` function as-is by the C
runtime system. Since Fossil uses commas to separate multiple glob
patterns, this means "all files from the root of the Fossil checkout
directory downward and nothing else," which is of course equivalent to
"all managed files in this repository," our original goal.


## Experimenting

To preview the effects of command line glob pattern expansion for
various glob patterns (unquoted, quoted, comma-terminated), for any
combination of command shell, OS, C run time, and Fossil version,
preceed the command you want to test with [`test-echo`][] like so:


    $ fossil test-echo setting crlf-glob "*"
    C:\> echo * | fossil test-echo setting crlf-glob --args -

The [`test-glob`][] command is also handy to test if a string
matches a glob pattern.

[`test-echo`]: /help?cmd=test-echo
[`test-glob`]: /help?cmd=test-glob


## Converting `.gitignore` to `ignore-glob`