Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Pattern Matching and Regular Expressions

This section describes the meta-characters and rules for filename expansion, pattern matching for the case statement, and regular expressions.

Filename Expansion and Pattern Matching

The rules for filename expansion are as follows:

• Any word on the command line that contains a meta-character is expanded to a list of files that match the pattern word.

• If no filename matches are found, the pattern word is not substituted.

• Meta-characters cannot match a leading period or a slash.

The filename expansion meta-characters are

*	matches 0 or more of any character
?	matches exactly 1 of any character
[list]	matches exactly 1 of any character in list
[!list]	matches exactly 1 of any character not in list

Limited Regular ...