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(find.info)Shell Pattern Matching

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Shell Pattern Matching
----------------------

   `find' and `locate' can compare file names, or parts of file names,
to shell patterns.  A "shell pattern" is a string that may contain the
following special characters, which are known as "wildcards" or
"metacharacters".

   You must quote patterns that contain metacharacters to prevent the
shell from expanding them itself.  Double and single quotes both work;
so does escaping with a backslash.

`*'
     Matches any zero or more characters.

`?'
     Matches any one character.

`[STRING]'
     Matches exactly one character that is a member of the string
     STRING.  This is called a "character class".  As a shorthand,
     STRING may contain ranges, which consist of two characters with a
     dash between them.  For example, the class `[a-z0-9_]' matches a
     lowercase letter, a number, or an underscore.  You can negate a
     class by placing a `!' or `^' immediately after the opening
     bracket.  Thus, `[^A-Z@]' matches any character except an
     uppercase letter or an at sign.

`\'
     Removes the special meaning of the character that follows it.  This
     works even in character classes.

   In the `find' tests that do shell pattern matching (`-name',
`-path', etc.), wildcards in the pattern do not match a `.' at the
beginning of a file name.  This is not the case for `locate'.  Thus,
`find -name '*macs'' does not match a file named `.emacs', but `locate
'*macs'' does.

   Slash characters have no special significance in the shell pattern
matching that `find' and `locate' do, unlike in the shell, in which
wildcards do not match them.  Therefore, a pattern `foo*bar' can match
a file name `foo3/bar', and a pattern `./sr*sc' can match a file name
`./src/misc'.