A Quick Introduction to Unix/Wildcards

Wildcards
A wildcard is a character that can stand for all members of some class of characters. When you use a wildcard the computer systems substitutes the members of the class for the wildcard character. The examples below will make this clearer. We will use the command ls for illustration.

The * wildcard
The character * is a wildcard and matches zero or more character(s) in a file (or directory) name. For example, in your mytraining directory, you might type % ls list* This will list all files in the current directory starting with list. You could type % ls *list This will list all files in the current directory ending with list.

The ? wildcard
The character ? will match exactly one character.

So ?ouse will match files like house and mouse, but not grouse. An example use of this syntax is: % ls ?list