Wildcards, Sets, and Brace Expansion
Weâve already used wildcards in a few places in this chapter, but
thereâs a lot more you can do with them than just using the *
and ?
operators to match strings and characters, respectively, as shown in Table 7-5.
Table 7-5. Wildcards and their meanings
Wildcard | Meaning |
---|---|
| Any sequence of characters, except for a leading period |
| Any single character, except for a leading period |
| Any one of the characters in the set |
| Any one of the characters from |
| Any single character not in the set |
| Any single character not from |
| Match all the characters and/or strings |
Using Sets and Ranges
A set of characters placed within a pair of rectangular brackets
can match a single character in a file or folder name. This is a more
precise version of the ?
single-character wildcard. For example, the set [abcdef]
will match any of the six characters
shown so that [abcdef]ark.txt
will
match the filenames bark.txt and
dark.txt, as long as they both
exist. You can also save on typing by using a hyphen to indicate a range
of characters so that [a-f]
is
equivalent to [abcdef]
.
Another neat thing you can do with a set is force all upper- or
all lowercase matches using the ranges [A-Z]
or [a-z]
. Or you can limit the matching to only
alphabetical characters of either case (excluding digits and other
characters) by using the set [a-zA-z]
. And you can also use numbers in a
range, as in [0-9]
.
Alternatively, you can ...
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