Wildcard Patterns

*

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 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 others 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.