Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

Filename Metacharacters

Table 5-2. Filename metacharacters

Characters	Meaning
*	Match any string of zero or more characters.
?	Match any single character.
[abc...]	Match any one of the enclosed characters; a hyphen can be used to specify a range (e.g., a-z, A-Z, 0-9).
[!abc...]	Match any character not among the enclosed characters.
[^abc...]	Same as [!abc ...].
{str1,...}	Brace expansion: match any of the enclosed strings.
~name	Home directory of user name. With no name, Home directory of current user.
~+	Current working directory (PWD).
~-	Previous working directory from directory stack (OLDPWD; see also the pushd built-in command).
~+n	The nth entry in the directory stack, counting from the start of the list with the first entry being 0.
~-n	The nth entry in the directory stack, counting from the end of the list with the last entry being 0.

Patterns can be a sequence of patterns separated by |. If any subpatterns match, the entire sequence is considered matching. This extended syntax resembles that of egrep and awk.

Examples

    $ ls new*          List new and new.1
    $ cat ch?          Match ch9 but not ch10
    $ vi [D-R]*        Match files that begin with uppercase D through R