MirBSD manpage: glob(7)

GLOB(7)                      BSD Reference 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 mksh(1),
     csh(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 spe-
     cial 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
             represent itself it must be quoted or appear later in the list.

             Within a bracket expression, the name of a character class en-
             closed in '[:' and ':]' stands for the list of all characters be-
             longing 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.

             Note that character classes may not be universally supported.

     [!..]   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 introduc-
     tion of the Bourne shell, this functionality was incorporated into the
     shell itself.

MirBSD #10-current            September 4, 2020                              1