glob(7) - NetBSD Manual Pages

GLOB(7)             NetBSD 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 rep-
             resent 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 brack-
             ets.

     \       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 intro-
     duction of the Bourne shell, this functionality was incorporated into the
     shell itself.

NetBSD 9.1                     November 30, 2010                    NetBSD 9.1