Summary of wildcards and their meanings
| Wildcard |
Meaning |
| * |
Matches any characters |
| ? |
Matches any single character |
| [characters] |
Matches any character that is a member of the set characters. The set of characters may also be expressed as a POSIX character class such as one of the following:
POSIX Character Classes
| [:alnum:] |
Alphanumeric characters |
| [:alpha:] |
Alphabetic characters |
| [:digit:] |
Numerals |
| [:upper:] |
Uppercase alphabetic characters |
| [:lower:] |
Lowercase alphabetic characters |
|
| [!characters] |
Matches any character that is not a member of the set characters |
Examples of wildcard matching
| Pattern |
Matches |
*
|
All filenames |
g*
|
All filenames that begin with the character “g” |
b*.txt
|
All filenames that begin with the character “b” and end with the characters “.txt” |
Data???
|
Any filename that begins with the characters “Data” followed by exactly 3 more characters |
[abc]*
|
Any filename that begins with “a” or “b” or “c” followed by any other characters |
[[:upper:]]*
|
Any filename that begins with an uppercase letter. This is an example of a character class. |
BACKUP.[[:digit:]][[:digit:]]
|
Another example of character classes. This pattern matches any filename that begins with the characters “BACKUP.” followed by exactly two numerals. |
*[![:lower:]]
|
Any filename that does not end with a lowercase letter. |
You can use wildcards with any command that accepts filename arguments.
Learning 