fish shell: Glob function?

When I migrated to fish from bash, I found glob patterns like "tmp[0-9][0-9].pdf" aren't supported. Then, recently fish has stopped to support the ? wildcard:

$ fish --version
fish, version 4.0.0
$ ls tmp00.pdf
tmp00.pdf
$ ls tmp??.pdf
ls: tmp??.pdf: No such file or directory
$

https://fishshell.com/docs/4.0/fish_for_bash_users.html says, "Fish only supports the * and ** glob (and the deprecated ? glob) as syntax."

So, has somebody written a fish function that can simulate the good-old glob? which might be used like

for file in (fmatch 'img..\.jpg') # to get img00.jpg, img01.jpg, . . .
   # do something on $file

With some help from ChatGPT, I've been able to write something that filters the output from '*' with string match -r -- $regex -- $file, but the handling of paths is incredibly hard to me:

# bash
for file in ../../*/img??.jpg # How to implement this?

and also the constant need of escaping . in regex is tedious, especially when your path includes ../.

I tried fd -g <glob pattern> but this glob doesn't seem to allow for paths.

I need the good old Glob. Perhaps I should admit the defeat :-) and do this

function glob --description 'Good old glob'
    if test (count $argv) -ne 1
        echo "Usage: glob <glob_pattern>"
        return 1
    end
    bash -c 'printf "%s\n" $*' _ $argv[1] # call bash!
end

Edit: Initially, I wrote

bash -c "ls $argv[1]"

But a better version was proposed by @CharlesDuffy, which I've replaced mine with, in the above fish function. [Please refer to @CharlesDuffy's discussion below for why printf and what problems exist in $*. But, given that the above solution still has some problems, it's probably better to install this glob command instead of writing a fish function like the above.]

I'm already using the glob.fish function defined as above. So far so good. glob tmp[0-9][0-9].pdf works!

I happened to be looking for a solution to this exact problem today...

Standing on the shoulders of everyone in the discussion above (special thanks to Ryo and Charles Duffy), I came up with this improved but somewhat "uglified" and more complex version of OP’s function...

function bash_glob --description 'Expand bash-style glob string into an array'
    [ (count $argv) -eq 0 ] && echo 'Usage: bash_glob <pattern>' && return 1

    bash -c '
        shopt -s nullglob;
        IFS=;
        eval "printf \"%s\\\\\\0\" $*"
    ' _ $argv | string split0
end

Example:

me@my-computer ~> bash_glob '.config/[e-n]??[cm]*/README.{md,txt}'

.config/emacs/README.md
.config/nvim/README.md

me@my-computer ~> ▇

Main Changes:

• \0 as an array separator: Avoids wrong processing of paths containing whitespaces.
• IFS= as a security measure: Prevents word splitting and potential code injection in Bash.
• eval: Ensures Bash fully expands $*, and that the glob patterns are processed entirely within Bash.
• shopt -s nullglob: Prevents unexpanded glob patterns from appearing as extra arguments - this way, only matched files are included in the result.

Only with these changes was I able to get the results I needed, since I did have to handle filenames with spaces, glob patterns that wouldn’t always expand, and other edge cases. This approach avoids most issues, at least.