Chapter 8. Filters, Pipes, and Wildcards!

If you've ever learned a foreign language, you know that the most common approach is to start by building your vocabulary (always including the names of the months, for some reason) and then learning about the rules of sentence construction. The Unix command line is much like a language. Now you've learned many Unix words, so it's time to learn how to put them together as sentences using file redirection, filters, and pipes.

One of the trickiest aspects of Unix is the concept of wildcards and regular expressions. A wildcard allows you to “guess” at a filename, or to specify a group of filenames easily. Regular expressions are a pattern-matching language that are different from, and more powerful than, wildcards. ...

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