wildcards

The Bash shell, integral to the Linux environment, offers powerful features for manipulating data and automating tasks. Among these features, shell expansion and globbing stand out as essential tools for users who frequently interact with the shell. In this article, we will explore the intricacies of these features and provide operating instructions for managing them across different Linux distributions. Shell expansion in Bash refers to the way the shell interprets and transforms inputs before executing a command. It encompasses several types, including brace expansion, tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, arithmetic expansion, and pathname expansion.

If you’ve found yourself dabbling in file management tasks, whether it be through a command terminal on Unix, Linux, or even Windows, knowing how to effectively use wildcards can significantly speed up your workflow. Wildcards are powerful characters or strings used in file commands to help match or filter out files with matching patterns. Common wildcards include the asterisk (*), the question mark (?), and character ranges ([]). We will explore how each of these wildcards can be used to perform file operations efficiently. The asterisk is perhaps the most widely recognized wildcard character. It is used to represent any number of characters, including no character, in file and directory names.