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 dierent
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:
1a
Use the touch command to create several (empty) les with dierent
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:
2a
To list all les with the .html extension, enter
ls -l *.html
Shell Basics 207
