| Following splitting, each field is scanned for the characters *, ?, (, and [unless the -f option has been set. If one of these characters appears, then the word is regarded as a pattern. Each file name component that contains any pattern character is replaced with a lexicographically sorted set of names that matches the pattern from that directory. If no file name is found that matches the pattern, then that component of the filename is left unchanged. If FIGNORE is set, then each file name component that matches the pattern defined by the value of FIGNORE is ignored when generating the matching filenames. The names . and .. are also ignored. If FIGNORE is not set, the character . at the start of each file name component will be ignored unless the first character of the pattern corresponding to this component is the character . itself. Note, that for other uses of pattern matching the / and . are not treated specially. | * | Matches any string, including the null string. | | ? | Matches any single character. | | [. . .] | Matches any one of the enclosed characters. A pair of characters separated by - matches any character lexically between the pair, inclusive. If the first character following the opening [is a ! then any character not enclosed is matched. A - can be included in the character set by putting it as the first or last character. Within [ and ], character classes can be specified with the syntax [:class:] where class is one of the following classes defined in the ANSI-C standard:
alnum alpha blank cntrl digit graph lower print
punct space upper xdigit
Within [ and ] , an equivalence class can be specified with the syntax [=c=] which matches all characters with the same primary collation weight (as defined by the current locale) as the character c. Within [ and ] , [.symbol.] matches the collating symbol symbol. |
A pattern-list is a list of one or more patterns separated from each other with a & or |. A & signifies that all patterns must be matched whereas | requires that only one pattern be matched. Composite patterns can be formed with one or more of the following sub-patterns: ?(pattern-list) | Optionally matches any one of the given patterns. | *(pattern-list) | Matches zero or more occurrences of the given patterns. | +(pattern-list) | Matches one or more occurrences of the given patterns. | @(pattern-list) | Matches exactly one of the given patterns. | !(pattern-list) | Matches anything except one of the given patterns. |
Each sub-pattern in a composite pattern is numbered, starting at 1, by the location of the (within the pattern. The sequence \n, where n is a single digit and \n comes after the n-th. sub-pattern, matches the same string as the sub-pattern itself. |
