Visual QuickStart Guide [Electronic resources] : Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

Wildcards in File Names & Directories

One frustrating activity in Mac OS 9.x and earlier was working with a group of files. Other than Shift-clicking or dragging to select the group, you had no good way to select group items by namefor example, to select all files that started with the characters

file and ended with the characters

.doc .

Unix, however, makes this easy by enabling you to use three special characters as wildcards:

Asterisk (*), which is referred to as star, is a wildcard for zero or more charactersany character!

Question mark (?) is a wildcard for any single character.

Brackets ([ and ]) around one or more characters act as a wildcard for any of the enclosed characters.

You can place the wildcard wherever you want in the name you are searching for. As you can imagine, wildcards are powerful tools for selecting or listing files or subdirectories.

Tip

The brackets wildcard can include individual characters, such as [ABCD] or character ranges, such as [A-G] or [1-6].

Using wildcards

The best way to explain how you can use wildcards is to show you some examples.

Suppose your Documents subdirectory contained the following subdirectories and files:

Here are some examples to illustrate the asterisk wildcard (Figure 18 ):

To work with all the files that start with the characters

file , you enter file*.

To work with all the files that begin with the characters

file and end with the characters

doc , you enter file*doc.

To work with all the files that end with the characters

txt , you enter *txt.

These examples illustrate the question mark wildcard (Figure 19 ):

To work with files named

file10.txt, file11.txt , and

file12.txt , you enter file1?.txt.

To work with files named

file10.txt and

file20.txt , you enter file?0.txt.

To work with subdirectories named

dir1 and

dir2 , you enter dir?.

To work with files named

file01.doc, file11.txt , and

file21.txt , you enter file?1.*. (Okay, so that one uses two wildcards.)

And these examples illustrate the brackets wildcard in action (Figure 20 ):

To work with files named

file11.txt and

file12.txt (but not

file10.txt ), you enter file1[12].txt.

To work with files named

file01.doc, file10.txt , and

file11.txt , you enter file[01][01].*. (Yes, that's another one with multiple wildcard characters.)

To view a directory list using a wildcard

Type ls followed by the search string for the files or directories you want to display (see previous examples) and press .

A list containing only the files and directories that match the search string appear (