I am trying to make a rule that would work the same on a directory and any of its sub sub-directory (to avoid having to repeat the rule several times). I would like to have access to the name of the subdirectory if there is one.
My approach was to make the sub-directory optional. Given that wildcards can be made to accept an empty string by explicitly giving the ".*" pattern, I therefore tried the following rule:
rule test_optional_sub_dir:
input:
"{adir}/{bdir}/a.txt"
output:
"{adir}/{bdir,.*}/b.txt"
shell:
"cp {input} {output}"
I was hoping that this rule would match both A/b.txt and A/B/b.txt.
However, A/b.txt doesn't match the rule. (Neither does A//b.txt which would be the litteral omission of bdir, I guess the double / gets removed before the matching happens).
The following rule works with both A/b.txt and A/B/b.txt:
rule test_optional_sub_dir2:
input:
"{path}/a.txt"
output:
"{path,.*}/b.txt"
shell:
"cp {input} {output}"
but the problem in this case is that I don't have easy access to the name of the directories in path. I could use the function pathlib.Path to break {path} up but this seems to get overly complicated.
Is there a better way to accomplish what I am trying to do?
Thanks a lot for your help.