Linux Shells Wildcard Patterns For Efficient Filename Matching
Learn Linux shell wildcards & globbing to match filenames efficiently. Wildcard patterns like *ing.pdf & [cb]at.gif can be used with ls, cp, mv commands.
The two features of Linux shells — wildcards and globbing — can sometimes save us a lot of time by letting us communicate to the computer to match filenames in an efficient way to do something with them like displaying, copying, moving, removing etc. A wildcard is a character or a set of characters that acts as a placeholder for other characters. A wildcard character(aka metacharacter) is a wildcard containing a single character. Wildcards looks like this: *, ?, [a-z0-4]. We will learn the meaning of these symbols in a minute. Wildcard pattern(aka glob pattern, glob or just pattern) is a strin...