What has happened here? The shell has treated the ? character as a special character that means “match any character”. Report1.txt report2.txt report3.txt report4.txt report5.txt

Now what if you want to do some common operation to just the report files? You can use the single wildcard character ? to specify all the report files like this:- $ ls report?.txt Suppose you have a directory with a lot of similarly-named files in it:- $ lsĪppendix.txt report1.txt report3.txt report5.txt Because just like the Joker or “wild card” in a pack of cards, a wildcard is a character that can act as a stand-in for any other character (or characters) in a file path. That’s patently incorrect, but probably forgivable in those pre-Google days (he didn’t look like a hardcore card player). Many, many years ago I remember a tutor in an introductory CS lecture telling the whole class that wildcards were nothing to do with cards.

It’s a three-hour course covering everything you need to know to make you a command line pro – and it’s available free for a limited time only! What’s a Wildcard? The content of this post is now covered in some depth on my Udemy course Learn to be a macOS Command Line Ninja. Many casual command line users will have a passing familiarity with them but most people don’t really understand how they actually work. A very useful concept on the macOS (and Linux) command line is that of wildcards.

Wildcards for rename mac sierra