[FEATURE]: Treat permission path patterns as proper glob patterns, with support for both relative and absolute patterns.

[CarloWood]

Feature hasn't been suggested before.

• I have verified this feature I'm about to request hasn't been suggested before.

Describe the enhancement you want to request

At the moment, permission path matching does not behave like standard glob matching.
This has several downsides, among which the inability to specify a pattern that only matches everything inside the worktree, but not outside the worktree.

The problem

1. A * is currently replaced with a .* in regex, matching everything including multiple directories and ../.
2. It is not possible to specify a pattern that matches an absolute path for the "edit" section, which is only matched against the path relative to the current worktree.
3. Some permission keyword's patterns are matched against absolute paths, others are matched against relative paths.

Current situation

permission keyword:

• "read" : matched against the absolute target path.
• "edit" : matched against a path relative to Instance.worktree.
• "external_directory" — matched against an absolute directory glob.
• "list" — matched against the absolute directory being listed.

Proposal

Unify all filepath matching as true globbing, including support for a globstar (**).
This can achieved with the already existing path.matchesGlob in typescript.

For example:

daniel:~/projects/github/ai-cli/globtest>cat test.ts
import path from "node:path";

const patterns = ["*", "*/*", "**/*", "../**/*"];
const filepaths = ["bar/foo", "foo", "../foo", "../../foo"];

for (const pattern of patterns) {
  console.log(`Pattern: ${pattern}`);
  for (const filepath of filepaths) {
    console.log(`  ${JSON.stringify(filepath)}: ${path.matchesGlob(filepath, pattern)}`);
  }
}
daniel:~/projects/github/ai-cli/globtest>node test.ts
Pattern: *
  "bar/foo": false
  "foo": true
  "../foo": false
  "../../foo": false
Pattern: */*
  "bar/foo": true
  "foo": false
  "../foo": false
  "../../foo": false
Pattern: **/*
  "bar/foo": true
  "foo": true
  "../foo": false
  "../../foo": false
Pattern: ../**/*
  "bar/foo": false
  "foo": false
  "../foo": true
  "../../foo": false

If path.matchesGlob is used for "read", "edit", "external_directory" and "list" (all permission keywords that match filepaths) then

1. A single * matches just one path component as opposed to any number of subdirectories and even ../../etc/passwd, making it much more useful.
2. "**/*" (or just "**") can be used to match every file inside worktree without running the risk it matches something outside of it.
3. all of them will support both absolute and relative paths (relative to the current worktree)

[github-actions]

This issue might be a duplicate of existing issues. Please check:

• [FEATURE]: more intelligent use of "edit" permission patterns. #22336: Very similar feature request (also by the same author) proposing more intelligent edit permission patterns, including absolute path support and worktree-boundary enforcement
• edit permission uses relative paths but external_directory uses absolute paths, breaking agent-level path rules #20045: Bug report documenting the inconsistency between edit (relative paths) and external_directory (absolute paths) permission matching — the same root problem described here

[CarloWood]

I closed #22336 in favor of this one although it has an orthogonal component that I think we should keep, namely that (glob) patterns that return true when passed to path.isAbsolute should be matched to the absolute filepath, otherwise to the relative filepath. And treat everything the same (read, edit, external_directory, list). Doing that then also addresses #20045 completely.

[github-actions]

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