Wildcards

A wildcard is a character that can stand for all members of some class of characters. When you use a wildcard the computer systems substitutes the members of the class for the wildcard character. The examples below will make this clearer. We will use the command ls for illustration.

The * wildcard

The character * is a wildcard and matches zero or more character(s) in a file (or directory) name. For example, in your mytraining directory, you might type

% ls list*

This will list all files in the current directory starting with list.

You could type

% ls *list

This will list all files in the current directory ending with list.

The ? wildcard

The character ? will match exactly one character.

So ?ouse will match files like house and mouse, but not grouse.

An example use of this syntax is:

% ls ?list

Contents

• Components
• Shells and subshells
• Directory Structure
• Changing Directories
• Listing Files and Directories
• Pathnames
• Files and Processes
• Wildcards
• Exercises 1
• Creating Directories
• Creating Files
• Special Directories
• Exercises 2
• Copying Files
• Moving Files
• Deleting Files
• Exercises 3
• Redirection
• Searching Text Files
• More grep examples
• Permissions on Files and Directories
• Editing Text
• Exercises 4
• My First Shell Script
• Job Control
• Links
• Environment Variables