Department of Engineering

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Wildcard characters

The * and ? characters have a special meaning to the shell when used where filenames are expected. If you have files called bashful, sneezy and grumpy in your directory and you type

  ls *y

you'll list sneezy and grumpy because * can represent any number of characters (except an initial '.'). ? represents a single character, so

  ls *u?

will only print filenames whose penultimate letter is u.