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and paths with the help of →| , you can simultaneously check whether the file or path
you want to enter really exists (and you can be sure of getting the spelling right).
Wild Cards
Another convenience offered by the shell is wild cards for pathname expansion. Wild
cards are characters that can stand for other characters. There are three different types
of these in Bash:
?
*
Matches exactly one arbitrary character
Matches any number of characters
[set]
Matches one of the characters from the group specified inside the square brackets,
which is represented here by the string set. As part of set you can also specify
character classes using the syntax [:class:], where a class is one of alnum,
alpha, ascii, etc.
Using ! or ^ at the beginning of the group ([!set]) matches one character other than
those identified by set.
Assuming that your test directory contains the files Testfile, Testfile1,
Testfile2, and datafile, the command ls Testfile? lists the files
Testfile1 and Testfile2. With ls Test*, the list also includes Testfile.
ls *fil* shows all the sample files. Finally, you can use the set wild card to address
all sample files whose last character is a number: ls Testfile[1-9] or, using
classes, ls Testfile[[:digit:]].
Of the four types of wild cards, the most inclusive one is the asterisk. It could be used
to copy all files contained in one directory to another one or to delete all files with one
command. The command rm *fil*, for instance, would delete all files in the current
directory whose name includes the string fil.
Working with the Shell 99