find: Shell Pattern Matching
2.2.4 Shell Pattern Matching
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'find' and 'locate' can compare file names, or parts of file names, to
shell patterns. A "shell pattern" is a string that may contain the
following special characters, which are known as "wildcards" or
"metacharacters".
You must quote patterns that contain metacharacters to prevent the
shell from expanding them itself. Double and single quotes both work;
so does escaping with a backslash.
'*'
Matches any zero or more characters.
'?'
Matches any one character.
'[STRING]'
Matches exactly one character that is a member of the string
STRING. This is called a "character class". As a shorthand,
STRING may contain ranges, which consist of two characters with a
dash between them. For example, the class '[a-z0-9_]' matches a
lowercase letter, a number, or an underscore. You can negate a
class by placing a '!' or '^' immediately after the opening
bracket. Thus, '[^A-Z@]' matches any character except an uppercase
letter or an at sign.
'\'
Removes the special meaning of the character that follows it. This
works even in character classes.
In the 'find' tests that do shell pattern matching ('-name',
'-wholename', etc.), wildcards in the pattern will match a '.' at the
beginning of a file name. This is also the case for 'locate'. Thus,
'find -name '*macs'' will match a file named '.emacs', as will 'locate
'*macs''.
Slash characters have no special significance in the shell pattern
matching that 'find' and 'locate' do, unlike in the shell, in which
wildcards do not match them. Therefore, a pattern 'foo*bar' can match a
file name 'foo3/bar', and a pattern './sr*sc' can match a file name
'./src/misc'.
If you want to locate some files with the 'locate' command but don't
need to see the full list you can use the '--limit' option to see just a
small number of results, or the '--count' option to display only the
total number of matches.
Info Catalog
find: Fast Full Name Search
find: Name