Ubuntu: Up and Running

Wildcards, Sets, and Brace Expansion

We’ve already used wildcards in a few places in this chapter, but there’s a lot more you can do with them than just using the * and ? operators to match strings and characters, respectively, as shown in Table 7-5.

Table 7-5. Wildcards and their meanings

Wildcard	Meaning
*	Any sequence of characters, except for a leading period
?	Any single character, except for a leading period
[set]	Any one of the characters in the set
[ch1-ch2]	Any one of the characters from ch1 through ch2
[^set]	Any single character not in the set
[^ch1-ch2]	Any single character not from ch1 through ch2
{ch,str,etc…}	Match all the characters and/or strings

Using Sets and Ranges

A set of characters placed within a pair of rectangular brackets can match a single character in a file or folder name. This is a more precise version of the ? single-character wildcard. For example, the set [abcdef] will match any of the six characters shown so that [abcdef]ark.txt will match the filenames bark.txt and dark.txt, as long as they both exist. You can also save on typing by using a hyphen to indicate a range of characters so that [a-f] is equivalent to [abcdef].

Another neat thing you can do with a set is force all upper- or all lowercase matches using the ranges [A-Z] or [a-z]. Or you can limit the matching to only alphabetical characters of either case (excluding digits and other characters) by using the set [a-zA-z]. And you can also use numbers in a range, as in [0-9].

Alternatively, you can exclude characters ...