Shell globs

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

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

...very simple ones, usually only:

? 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]

See also fnmatch(), which is a "does a single name match this glob"

whereas glob() both walks your filesystem and returns all matching filenames

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

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