Use wild card in Linux commands
A wild card is a character that can be used as a substitute for any of a class of characters in a command. It can increase the flexibility and efficiency of our commands.
Star Wild card
ls ab*
The above command will list all file name that start with ab
like abc
, abcd
, ab3ve
, ab
etc if they exist.
Question Mark Wild card
ls ab?
The above command will list all file name that have three characters in its name & the name must start with ab
and the last character will be anything like abc
, ab3
, abZ
etc if they exist.
Square Brackets Wild card
ls ab[123]
The above command will list files that have name like ab1
, ab2
and ab3
if they exist.
We can also specify a range for this wild card.
ls ab[a-f]
ls ab[1-9]
ls ab[a-z]
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