The following table describes wildcard patterns, listing the pattern and its use.
Table 6–1 Wildcard Patterns| Pattern | Use | 
|---|---|
| * | Match zero or more characters. | 
| ? | Match exactly one occurrence of any character. | 
| | | An or expression. The substrings used with this operator can contain other special characters such as * or $. The substrings must be enclosed in parentheses, for example, (a|b|c), but the parentheses cannot be nested. | 
| $ | Match the end of the string. This wildcard is useful in or expressions. | 
| [abc] | Match one occurrence of the characters a, b, or c. Within these expressions, the only character that needs to be treated as a special character is ]. All other characters are not special. | 
| [a-z] | Match one occurrence of a character between a and z. | 
| [^az] | Match any character except a or z. | 
| *~ | This expression, followed by another expression, removes any pattern matching the second expression. | 
| * | Match zero or more characters. |