Practical UNIX

Wildcards for Regular Expressions (R.E.)

These are a second group of wildcards that can be only with commands that allow regular expression wildcard pattern matching.

SEE ALSO

For more information, see page 502 and page 531

^ indicates start of line but only when found at start of pattern.

$ indicates end of line but only when found at end of pattern.

means exactly one of any character.

[...] means exactly one of the alternatives listed.

[^...] means any one character except for the alternatives listed.

\{n\} means exactly n occurrences of preceding element (supported in grep and sed; not supported in egrep or awk—use {n} for Perl).

\{n,\} means ...