Support wildcards when selecting resources

[rhuss]

When using commands which requires a resource name as argument like kn revision get <revision> or kn service get <srv> (or kn service list if not merged together with kn service get as proposed in #48), then having a wildcard evaluation on the argument would be very helpful, especially when dealing with resource names that have autogenerated suffixes (like revisions).

More general, a semantic like for general Unix commands like ls would be very useful IMO.

• kn revision get --> get all revisions
• kn revision get * --> same as above
• kn revision get myrevision-1-9865 --> get specific revision
• kn revision get myrevision-1-* --> get revision with wildcard
• kn revision get myrevision* --> filter on revisions, possibly returning multiple entries.

[duglin]

+1 I have scripts to do stuff like this for me for kubectl cmds. In particular, to get the equivalent of kubectl logs foo* is really useful when the pods name is generated.

[cppforlife]

cant use a star btw as it has meaning for bash.

[evankanderson]

I believe bash will pass through the * if it does not glob anything, but if so, that's non-portable between directories and generally a bad idea. On the other hand, you can write 'foo*' without too much more difficulty, and the familiar syntax may be worth it.

[sixolet]

Do we want glob or regex?

I like kn service get --glob 'myrevision-1-*' or kn service get --regex 'myrevision-1-.*' or something.

[rhuss]

Right, a shell will leave * untouched if it doesn't match anything.

And yes, you are in danger if one of your files in the current directory is named after your service like a resource descriptor file, which is not unlikely that such a file exists holding e.g. a service definition. However, I would expect wildcard matching mostly for matching random suffixes like on revisions for which you probably don't have a file/directory of the same name in the cwd.

Tbh, I think we can require quoting in such a situation, much like sed and grep does, too. Having a --glob to explicitly switch that behaviour on is of not much value IMO, as you get an error with or without this option when bash globbing kicks in accidentally.

I.e. kn service get --glob myservice* and kn service get myservice* would both give an error if there's a file myservice.yml in the current directory. Likewise, both would work if properly quoted. Using wildcards is opt-in, so people who don't use it won't suffer from any side effects.

I'm for globbing instead of regexps as this is imo (a) sufficient and (b) easier to use.

[duglin]

Another option I've done in the past for my tools is to assume the name given is a prefix, so just default to "*" at then end under the covers. No worry about bash matching files.

[duglin]

And of course, exact full matches take precedence over longer wild-card possibilities, so an exact match would not result in any potential "don't know which one you mean" type of error.

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[duglin]

@rhuss did you still want this?

[rhuss]

@duglin good point, I'm not sure if this is still a top priority. Of course it makes a nice touch. For scripting this would make probably quite some sense, for interactive usage we probably should better level up on our completion game, to allow context sensitive completion values (like actual names that are deployed).

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activity. It will automatically close after 30 more days of
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[rhuss]

/remove-lifecycle stale

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