.gitignore style fnmatch()

There's a library called pathspec which implements the full .gitignore specification, including things like **/*.py; the documentation describes how to handle Git pattern matching (you can also see code).

>>> import pathspec
>>> spec_src = '**/*.pyc'
>>> spec = pathspec.PathSpec.from_lines(pathspec.patterns.GitWildMatchPattern, spec_src.splitlines())
>>> set(spec.match_files({"test.py", "test.pyc", "deeper/file.pyc", "even/deeper/file.pyc"}))
set(['test.pyc', 'even/deeper/file.pyc', 'deeper/file.pyc'])
>>> set(spec.match_tree("pathspec/"))
set(['__init__.pyc', 'gitignore.pyc', 'util.pyc', 'pattern.pyc', 'tests/__init__.pyc', 'tests/test_gitignore.pyc', 'compat.pyc', 'pathspec.pyc'])

If you want to use mixed UNIX wildcard patterns as listed in your .gitignore example, why not just take each pattern and use fnmatch.translate with re.search?

import fnmatch
import re

s = '/path/eggs/foo/bar'
pattern = "eggs/*"

re.search(fnmatch.translate(pattern), s)
# <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x10049e988>

translate turns the wildcard pattern into a re pattern

Hidden UNIX files:

s = '/path/to/hidden/.file'
isHiddenFile = re.search(fnmatch.translate('.*'), s)
if not isHiddenFile:
    # do something with it