Wildcard
patterns
A wildcard pattern is a series of characters
that are matched against incoming character strings. You can use these
patterns when you define pattern matching criteria.
Matching
is done strictly from left to right, one character or basic wildcard
pattern at a time. Characters that are not part of match constructs
match themselves. The pattern and the incoming string must match completely.
For example, the pattern abcd does not match the input abcde or abc.
A compound wildcard pattern consists of one or more basic wildcard
patterns separated by ampersand (&) or tilde (~) characters. A
compound wildcard pattern is matched by attempting to match each of
its component basic wildcard patterns against the entire input string.
Basic and compound wildcard patterns are defined in the .
If the first character of a compound wildcard pattern
is an ampersand (&) or tilde (~) character, the compound is interpreted
as if an asterisk (*) appeared at the beginning of the pattern. For
example, the pattern ~*[0-9]* matches any string not containing any
digits. A trailing instance of an ampersand character (&) can
only match the empty string. A trailing instance of a tilde character
(~) can be read as “except for the empty string.” Spaces are interpreted
as characters and are subject to matching even if they are adjacent
to operators like “&”. Special characters for compound wildcard
patterns are summarized in the .