Understanding Wildcard Patterns

You can create lists of wildcard patterns that enable you to specify which URLs can be accessed from your site. Wildcards can be in the form of regular expressions or shell expressions, depending on usage. As a general rule:

• Use regular expressions for any pattern that matches destination URLs. This includes <Object ppath=...>, URL filters, and the NameTrans, PathCheck, and ObjectType functions.

• Use shell expressions for any pattern that matches incoming client or user IDs, including user names and groups for access control and the IP addresses or DNS names of incoming users, for example, <Client dns=...>.

You can specify several URLs by using regular expression wildcard patterns. Wildcards enable you to filter by domain name or by any URL with a given word in the URL. For example, you might want to block access to URLs that contain the string “careers.” To do this, you could specify http://.*careers.* as the regular expression for the template.