Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

Filename Metacharacters

*	Match any string of zero or more characters.
?	Match any single character.
[abc...]	Match any one of the enclosed characters; a hyphen can specify a range (e.g., a-z, A-Z, 0–9).
[!abc...]	Match any character not enclosed as above.
~	Home directory of the current user.
~ name	Home directory of user name.
~+	Current working directory ($PWD).
~-	Previous working directory ($OLDPWD).

In the Korn shell, or Bash with the extglob option on:

?( pattern )	Match zero or one instance of pattern.
*( pattern )	Match zero or more instances of pattern.
+( pattern )	Match one or more instances of pattern.
@( pattern )	Match exactly one instance of pattern.
!( pattern )	Match any strings that don’t match pattern.
\ n	Match the text matched by the n‘th subpattern in (...). ksh93 only.

This pattern can be a sequence of patterns separated by |, meaning that the match applies to any of the patterns. This extended syntax resembles that available in egrep and awk. In the Korn shell, but not in Bash, if & is used instead of |, all the patterns must match. & has higher precedence than |.

ksh93 and Bash support the POSIX [[=c=]] notation for matching characters that have the same weight, and [[.c.]] for specifying collating sequences. In addition, character classes, of the form [[:class:]], allow you to match the following classes of characters.

Class	Characters matched	Class	Characters matched
alnum	Alphanumeric characters ...