Pattern Matching vs. Wildcards
Operating systems use “wildcards” in order to make referring to filenames easier. The idea of regular expressions (or patterns) in Perl is very much like wildcards...at least conceptually. While wildcards are special characters that refer to filenames, regular expressions are special characters that refer to text within a string.
While most operating systems only have a few wildcards, Perl has many regular expressions (see the “Modifiers” section). In this manual, for brevity, a regular expression is often referred ...
