Shell globs

Globs, is associated with certain kinds of 'match this pattern'.

also called shell globs, because they are mainly seen in command lines

Compare with regular expressions, which are more powerful (but still single-string) ways of expressing patterns.

Shell globs match fairly simple patterns. you can only use:

? meaning one character of anything, and

* meaning any amount of characters of anything

...anything except the directory separateor, / {{(or presumably \ if imitated in windows)}}

[chars] meaning any one of the characters in this set

can also be used to match a literal ? or *

[!chars] meaning anything other than the characters in this set

I've seen [^chars] manage the same, though this isn't quite standard [1] and is more of a regexp-ism

If you have both a fnmatch and glob function:

• fnmatch() is a "matches a single given string with this pattern"

(probably nothing related to the filesystem unless you do it yourself)

• glob() is likely to read directory entries from your filesystem and returns all matching filenames

apparently fnmatch() is used in the glob() implementation