Wildcards

When searching for files (or copying or removing) it can be very handy to use wildcards.

The (*) symbol (pronounced splat) is probably the most common.

For example

ls *.txt

would return all text files

Because of extensions, wildcards behave a bit differently between DOS and Unix.

The command

ls *.txt

shows all files ending in .txt and is case sensitive

The command

ls R*.txt

shows all files beginning with capital R and with an extension .txt

If you use the symbol * on its own, it means all files in the working directory.

The character ? will match exactly one character. So “?ouse” will match files like house and mouse, but not grouse. Try typing

ls ?list

Exercise

Delete all files in the CLI/Backup directory, then copy all files from CLI directory to CLI/Backup directory.