Quote:
Originally Posted by
Straitsfan
So when would you glob and when would you use regular expressions? I'm still somewhat confused.
![Confused Smilie](https://www.unix.com/images/smilies/confused.gif)
Most of the time you won't have the option to choose between using glob or regular expressions, and will have to use what the tool offers. As a general rule of thumb you will be using glob for the shell prompt, and regex for everything else.
For example if from a shell prompt you type
ls p* you would expect the shell to expand p* to any file begining with p (glob) not any file with zero or more p's anywhere in the name (regex). Which highlights another difference in glob (patterns span the whole string, like having an implied "^" at the front and "$" at the end with regex).
Here is a little table with glob and regex
equivalent
glob | regex |
b | ^b$ |
b* | ^b.*$ |
*.jpg | ^.*\.jpg$ |
[ab]* | ^[ab].*$ |