Globbing

We now have the basics of regular expressions under control. There is another subject closely related to regular expressions on Linux: globbing. Even though you probably didn't realize it, you've already seen examples of globbing in this book.

Even better, there is actually a good chance you've used a glob pattern in practice. If, when working on the command line, you've ever used the wildcard character, *, you've been globbing!

What is globbing?

Simply said, a glob pattern describes injecting a wildcard character into a file path operation. So, when you do a cp * /tmp/, you copy all files (not directories!) in the current working directory to the /tmp/ directory.

The * expands to all regular files inside the working directory, and then all of those are copied to /tmp/.

Here's a simple example:

reader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_10$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 reader reader  29 Oct 14 10:29 character-class.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 reader reader 219 Oct  8 19:22 grep-file.txt
reader@ubuntu:~/scripts...