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.Dd November 2, 2021
.Dt GLOB 7
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm glob
.Nd shell-style pattern matching
.Sh DESCRIPTION
Globbing characters

q wildcards
are special characters used to perform pattern matching of pathnames and
command arguments in the
.Xr csh 1 ,
.Xr ksh 1 ,
and
.Xr sh 1
shells as well as
the C library functions
.Xr fnmatch 3
and
.Xr glob 3 .
A glob pattern is a word containing one or more unquoted
.Ql ?
or
.Ql *
characters, or
.Dq Li [..]
sequences.

p
Globs should not be confused with the more powerful
regular expressions used by programs such as
.Xr grep 1 .
While there is some overlap in the special characters used in regular
expressions and globs, their meaning is different.

p
The pattern elements have the following meaning:
l -tag -width Ds t Li ? Matches any single character.
t Li * Matches any sequence of zero or more characters.
t Li [..] Matches any of the characters inside the brackets.
Ranges of characters can be specified by separating two characters by a
.Ql -
(e.g.\&
.Dq Li [a0-9]
matches the letter
.Sq a
or any digit).
In order to represent itself, a
.Ql -
must either be quoted or the first or last character in the character list.
Similarly, a
.Ql ]
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
.Ql !
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.

p
Within a bracket expression, the name of a
.Em character class
enclosed in
.Ql [:
and
.Ql :]
stands for the list of all characters belonging to that class.
Supported character classes:
l -column ".Li xdigit" ".Li xdigit" ".Li xdigit" -offset indent t Li "alnum" Ta Li "cntrl" Ta Li "lower" Ta Li "space" t Li "alpha" Ta Li "digit" Ta Li "print" Ta Li "upper" t Li "blank" Ta Li "graph" Ta Li "punct" Ta Li "xdigit" .El

p
These match characters using the macros specified in
.Xr ctype 3 .
A character class may not be used as an endpoint of a range.
t Li [!..] Like
.Li [..] ,
except it matches any character not inside the brackets.
t Li \e Matches the character following it verbatim.
This is useful to quote the special characters
.Ql ? ,
.Ql * ,
.Ql [ ,
and
.Ql \e
such that they lose their special meaning.
For example, the pattern
.Dq Li \e\e\e*\e[x]\e?
matches the string
.Dq \e*[x]? .
.El

p
Note that when matching a pathname, the path separator
.Ql / ,
is not matched by a
.Ql ? ,
or
.Ql * ,
character or by a
.Dq Li [..]
sequence.
Thus,

a /usr/*/*/X11
would match

a /usr/X11R7/lib/X11
and

a /usr/X11R7/include/X11
while

a /usr/*/X11
would not match either.
Likewise,

a /usr/*/bin
would match

a /usr/local/bin
but not

a /usr/bin .
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr fnmatch 3 ,
.Xr glob 3 ,
.Xr re_format 7
.Sh HISTORY
In early versions of
x , the shell did not do pattern expansion itself.
A dedicated program,

a /etc/glob ,
was used to perform the expansion and pass the results to a command.
In
.At v7 ,
with the introduction of the Bourne shell,
this functionality was incorporated into the shell itself.