Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Wildcards
Before moving on to more Darwin commands, we should have a quick lesson on wildcards and
pattern matching. Wildcards are special symbols that when used with other commands can help
limit or expand the results. Table 18-3 shows the three major wildcards and what they represent
or match.
Table 18-3. Darwin Wildcards
Wildcard Definition (Matches)
? The ? used on the command line matches any single character.
* The * matches any one or more characters in a file name.
[ ] The [ ] matches any characters listed between the brackets; this can include a series of
characters as well—for example, [l-p] would match l, m, n, o, and p.
To put this to use using what you learned previously, if we cd to /usr/bin and list out the
contents using ls, we are struck with a rather large list of files (in this case mostly executable
commands). Wildcards will allow us to selectively list out the directory contents in more manageable
chunks. For example, if we just wanted to list the files that begin with v, we could use
ls v*, like so:
Leopard:/usr/bin scott$ ls v*
vers_string* vi@ vim* vimtutor* vm_stat*
vgrind* view@ vimdiff@ vis* vmmap*
If for whatever reason we wanted to expand the search to include b and v, we could use
ls [bv]*:
Leopard:/usr/bin scott$ ls [bv]*
b2m* bg* bzcat* bzless* vimtutor*
banner* biff* bzcmp* bzmore* vis*
basename* bison* bzdiff* vers_string* vm_stat*
bashbug* bridget* bzegrep* vgrind* vmmap*
batch* bsdmake* bzfgrep* vi@
bbdiff* bspatch* bzgrep* view@
bbedit* bspatch_apple@ bzip2* vim*
bc* bunzip2* bzip2recover* vimdiff@
NOTE Like most things in Darwin, the characters used within the square brackets are case
sensitive, so [bv] would not match any Bs or Vs.
Finally, if we wanted to list all files with two-letter names that begin with any letter in the
alphabet from b to v, we could use ls [b-v]? and get the following:
Leopard:/usr/bin scott$ ls [b-v]?
bc* cc@ ci* dc* ex@ fg* ld* m4* nc* nm* pl* ri* su* ul*
bg* cd* co* du* fc* id* lp* md* nl* od* pr* rs* tr* vi@
Working with Files and Directories
CHAPTER 18 INTRODUCING DARWIN AND THE SHELL 297
While most people are perfectly happy and comfortable working with files and directories in the
Finder, there are some times when it’s either necessary or advantageous to work with files in