<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <title>Wildcard Matching</title> </head> <body style="font-size:12pt;font-family:helvetica"> <p><center><h2>Wildcard Matching</h2></center></p> <p> Most command shells such as bash or cmd.exe support "file globbing", the ability to identify a group of files by using wildcards. <br /> <br /> <table align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" border="0" width="100%"> <tr valign="top" bgcolor="#f0f0f0"> <td><center><img src="images/wildcard.png" /></center></td> </tr> </table> <br /> <br /> <p> Wildcard matching provides four features: </p> <ul> <li>Any character represents itself apart from those mentioned below. Thus 'c' matches the character 'c'. </li> <li>The '?' character matches any single character.</li> <li>The '*' matches zero or more of any characters.</li> <li>Sets of characters can be represented in square brackets. Within the character class, like outside, backslash has no special meaning. </li> </ul> <p> For example we could identify HTML files with <code>*.html</code>. This will match zero or more characters followed by a dot followed by 'h', 't', 'm' and 'l'. </p> <br /> <br /> <p> See also: <a href="browse.html">Browse</a>, <a href="filedialog.html">File Dialog</a>, <a href="findfile.html">Find File</a> </p> </body> </html>