English translation of */**

Question

*/** is read by my brain as "Give me everything in this directory and everything in it's directories, then EVERYTHING in all of their nested directories." But by that definition, ** should just give me the entire tree and it is two characters shorter. Since ** does not work this way, my definition is obviously flawed.

Is there an English translation of */** that better describes what it is actually doing?

Answer 1

I'd translate it as "Match all contents recursively of subdirectories of the current directory". The difference from using ** straight away is that this pattern does not match non-directories inside the current directory.