Shell Patterns
While most users learn shell pattern matching behavior early in their exposure to UNIX, it is useful to review it here before introducing the functions that implement it.
A shell pattern can consist of normal characters and meta-characters. Normal characters represent themselves, and meta-characters have a special meaning for pattern matching. The set of meta-characters for shell patterns is relatively small. They are
| * | Star (asterisk) |
| ? | Question mark |
| [ and ] | Square brackets |
| ! | Bang (in []) |
| - | Hypen (in []) |
| \ | Backslash |
Each meta-character is described in the subsections that follow.
The * Meta-Character
The * character can match zero or more characters. The following shell experiment on a FreeBSD system illustrates this meta-character ...
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