September 2000
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
14h 32m
English
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 * character can match zero or more characters. The following shell experiment on a FreeBSD system illustrates this meta-character ...
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