Globs
There is a lot that a shell can do for you to make your life easier. One of them is allowing for a level of uncertainty when typing in arguments on the shell. To that end, the shell defines several special characters that are treated like symbols for something, not like literal input. These are called global patterns, or globs. The characters that are used in globs are sometimes referred to as wildcards.
Do not confuse globs with regular expressions (regexps). While globs are quite a powerful tool on their own, they are no match for regexps. On the other hand, regexps are not evaluated by bash when it performs pattern matching.
The following table describes shell globs and their meaning. We’re going to explain their exact meaning through several examples:
|
Glob |
Meaning |
|
|
Matches any number of any characters (also zero) |
