glob(7) [netbsd man page]

GLOB(7) 					       BSD Miscellaneous Information Manual						   GLOB(7)

NAME

     glob -- shell-style pattern matching

DESCRIPTION

     Globbing characters (wildcards) are special characters used to perform pattern matching of pathnames and command arguments in the csh(1),
     ksh(1), and sh(1) shells as well as the C library functions fnmatch(3) and glob(3).  A glob pattern is a word containing one or more unquoted
     '?' or '*' characters, or ``[..]'' sequences.

     Globs should not be confused with the more powerful regular expressions used by programs such as grep(1).	While there is some overlap in the
     special characters used in regular expressions and globs, their meaning is different.

     The pattern elements have the following meaning:

     ?	     Matches any single character.

     *	     Matches any sequence of zero or more characters.

     [..]    Matches any of the characters inside the brackets.  Ranges of characters can be specified by separating two characters by a '-' (e.g.
	     ``[a0-9]'' matches the letter 'a' or any digit).  In order to represent itself, a '-' must either be quoted or the first or last
	     character in the character list.  Similarly, a ']' must be quoted or the first character in the list if it is to represent itself
	     instead of the end of the list.  Also, a '!' appearing at the start of the list has special meaning (see below), so to represent
	     itself it must be quoted or appear later in the list.

	     Within a bracket expression, the name of a character class enclosed in '[:' and ':]' stands for the list of all characters belonging
	     to that class.  Supported character classes:

		   alnum     cntrl     lower	 space
		   alpha     digit     print	 upper
		   blank     graph     punct	 xdigit

	     These match characters using the macros specified in ctype(3).  A character class may not be used as an endpoint of a range.

     [!..]   Like [..], except it matches any character not inside the brackets.

     	     Matches the character following it verbatim.  This is useful to quote the special characters '?', '*', '[', and '' such that they
	     lose their special meaning.  For example, the pattern ``\*[x]?'' matches the string ``*[x]?''.

     Note that when matching a pathname, the path separator '/', is not matched by a '?', or '*', character or by a ``[..]'' sequence.	Thus,
     /usr/*/*/X11 would match /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 and /usr/X11R6/include/X11 while /usr/*/X11 would not match either.  Likewise, /usr/*/bin would
     match /usr/local/bin but not /usr/bin.

SEE ALSO

     fnmatch(3), glob(3), re_format(7)

HISTORY

     In early versions of UNIX, the shell did not do pattern expansion itself.	A dedicated program, /etc/glob, was used to perform the expansion
     and pass the results to a command.  In Version 7 AT&T UNIX, with the introduction of the Bourne shell, this functionality was incorporated
     into the shell itself.

BSD
								 November 30, 2010							       BSD

Check Out this Related Man Page

SHELLEXP(3)						     Library Functions Manual						       SHELLEXP(3)

NAME

       shellexp - match string against a cruft filter pattern

SYNOPSIS

       extern int shellexp(const char *string, const char *pattern);

DESCRIPTION

       The shellexp() function is similar to fnmatch(3), but works with cruft patterns instead of standard glob(7) patterns.  The function returns
       a true value if string matches the cruft pattern pattern, and a false value (0) otherwise. Returns -1 in case of pattern syntax error.

       Cruft patterns are similar to glob(7) patterns, but are not fully compatible. The following special characters are supported:

       ? (a question mark)
	      matches exacly one character of string other than a slash.

       *      matches zero or more characters of string other than a slash.

       /** or /**/
	      matches zero or more path components in string.  Please note that you can only use ** when directly following a slash, and  further-
	      more, only when either directly preceding a slash or at the very end of pattern.	A ** followed by anything other than a slash makes
	      pattern invalid. A ** following anything else than a slash reduces it to having the same effect as *.

       [character-class]
	      Matches any character between the brackets exactly once. Named character classes are NOT supported. If the first	character  of  the
	      class  is  !   or ^, then the meaning is inverted (matches any character NOT listed between the brackets).  If you want to specify a
	      literal closing bracket in the class, then specify it as the first (or second, if you want to negate) character  after  the  opening
	      bracket.	Also, simple ASCII-order ranges are supported using a dash character (see examples section).

       Any other character matches itself.

EXAMPLES

       /a/b*/*c
	      matches /a/b/xyz.c, as well as /a/bcd/.c, but not /a/b/c/d.c.

       /a/**/*.c
	      matches all of the following: /a/a.c, /a/b/a.c, /a/b/c/a.c and /a/b/c/d/a.c.

       /a/[0-9][^0-9]*
	      matches /a/1abc, but not /a/12bc.

BUGS

       Uses  constant-length 1000 byte buffers to hold filenames. Also uses recursive function calls, which are not very efficient. Does not vali-
       date the pattern before matching, so any pattern errors (unbalanced brackets or misplaced **) are only reported when and  if  the  matching
       algorithm reaches them.

SEE ALSO

       fnmatch(3), glob(3), cruft(8) and dash-search(1).

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Marcin Owsiany <porridge@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).

								 October 17, 2007						       SHELLEXP(3)

Linux and UNIX Man Pages

glob(7) [netbsd man page]

Check Out this Related Man Page