netbsd man page for glob

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