Additional Shell Filename Wildcards

Other wildcard characters enable you to specify more complex patterns than you can with the ^* character. The shell wildcards supported by UNIX shells are ^*, ?, and [ ].

The ? wildcard matches any single character. The [ ] wildcard matches a single character in a list of characters appearing within square brackets. In the figure above, the list command is asked to show only those files whose names start with a capital M and end with a lowercase d, but can have any number of characters in between.

A few examples can help to build your understanding of wildcards. Consider a collection of five files with the names ReadMe.rtf, ReadMe.txt, read.rtf, read.txt, and It's All About Me.rtf:

• ^*.rtf matches ReadMe.rtf, read.rtf, and It's All About Me.rtf.

• ????.^* matches read.rtf and read.txt.

• [Rr]^*.rtf matches ReadMe.rtf and read.rtf.

• [A-Z]^* matches ReadMe.rtf, ReadMe.txt, and It's All About Me.rtf.