Pathname Expansion

• pathname expansion is also known as globbing
• the special pattern characters have the following meanings

  *

  matches any string

  ?

  mmatches exactly one character

  [characters]

  matches one of the characters listed

  [characters-characters]

  matches one of the characters included in the class

Examples:

ls *.jpg                  # shows every file ending in .jpg
ls */*                    # shows the content of every subdirectory
ls .??*                   # shows hidden files with at least 3 characters in the name

• there are some extensions which resembles the functionality of regular expressions, but are known only by recent versions ob bash and disabled by default. See extglob for details