Quick Start Guide

Procedure 17.7: Using Wildcards

Now suppose that your home directory contains a number of les with various le

extensions. It also holds several versions of one le which you saved under dierent

lenames myfile1.txt, myfile2.txt etc. You want to search for certain les accord-

ing to their properties.

1 First, create some test les in your home directory:

Use the touch command to create several (empty) les with dierent

le extensions, for example .pdf, .xml and .jpg.

You can do this consecutively (do not forget to use the Bash history

function) or with only one touch command: simply add several le-

names separated by a space.

1b Create at least two les that have the same le extension, for exam-

ple .html.

1c To create several “versions” of one le, enter

touch myfile{1..5}.txt

This command creates ve consecutively numbered les:

myfile1.txt,…,myfile5.txt

1d List the contents of your home directory. It should look similar to this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:34 foo.xml

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:47 home.html

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:47 index.html

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:47 toc.html

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:34 manual.pdf

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:49 myfile1.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:49 myfile2.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:49 myfile3.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:49 myfile4.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:49 myfile5.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 0 2006-07-14 13:32 tux.png

2 With the help of wild cards, select certain subsets of the les according to

various criteria:

To list all les with the .html extension, enter

ls -l *.html

Shell Basics 207