There are several tools that are useful
when submitting commands to the kernel via the shell.
These tools help make tasks more efficient. One such
tool is the wild card.
The wild cards that you will use most
often include the asterisk (*), the question mark (?) and
the brackets ([])
The asterisk is used to match any
character zero or more times. For example, if we modify
the "ls" command used in the last section, we can filter
the output for only files starting with "s" using the command
ls -l s*
The question mark on the other
hand, is used to match any single character. Thus
ls -l ???? will match any file with a name four characters long
such as temp or "temp"
Finally, brackets are used to specify
ranges or internal sets. Thus you can specify which
characters from within a set you are looking for such as in the
following case which matches any even number below 10: [02468]
Below is a table that shows some of the more
common uses for wildcards with the "ls" command
that you might use
