Questions tagged [wildcards]

You can specify a set of files matching a certain glob pattern using wildcard characters, e.g. cp *.txt /directory. This is handled by the shell, so it is available on the command line no matter what program you are starting. Conversely, if you need to pass one of the wildcard characters to a command, it must be quoted, e.g. rsync -a --exclude='*.bak' /source /destination.

Globbing is known by various names accross shell documentations: filename generation, pathname expansion, pattern matching, wildcard matching… Advanced shells such as bash, ksh and zsh implement additions to the basic glob patterns. These additions make wildcards as expressive as regular-expressions regex, but with a different syntax. There are other programs, such as rsync, that use a similar wildcards syntax to match files by name.

For more complex tasks such as matching files in subdirectories recursively or matching files by metadata such as date or size, try find.

References

• POSIX pattern matching notation
• bash pattern matching
• ksh file name generation
• zsh filename generation

Further reading

• Test if there are files matching a pattern in order to execute a script
• Find a string only in a specific file inside subdirectories
• How do you move all files (including hidden) from one directory to another?
• Rsync filter: copying one pattern only