Scripting

3.8    Globbing, Brace Extension, and Handling File and Directory Names

What happens if you pass *.txt or directory??/*.pdf to a command because you want to process all text files or all PDF files in a couple of subdirectories? The term “globbing” describes the mechanisms Bash provides for such tasks. Table 3.3 summarizes the meaning of Bash’s “wildcard characters.” (These characters are a simplified variant of the “regular expressions” that you’ll get to know in Chapter 9.)

Character	Meaning
?	Any character
*	Any number (also zero) of any characters
**	Recursive globbing (globstar)
[aeiou]	One of the specified characters
[a-z]	Character range
[a-zäöüß]	All lowercase letters (in German)
[A-Fa-f0-9] ...