The ? Wildcard

• Welcome to linuxzoo
  • Essential Linux
    • Wildcards and Links
      • Wildcard Characters
        • The ? Wildcard

The ? wildcard means 'any single characters'. Although you probably will not use this wildcard as much as the *, it is still useful. For example, if we want to list only the files that start with 'myfile' and end with a single additional character, we could type:

% ls myfile?
myfile2 myfile3

The ? wildcard character matches exactly one character. Thus, 'myfile' did not show up in this listing because it did not have another character at the end. Wildcards can be used with any Unix command which takes files or directories as parameters.

Copyright @ 2004-2012 Gordon Russell. All rights reserved.