Globbing and Quoting

This lesson will introduce you to the joy of quoting in bash. You will learn what globbing is and what its special characters are. It’ll also explain the difference between single and double quotes, and you’ll learn the difference between globs and regular expressions.

If you’ve come across it before, you may have wondered what the * in bash commands really means, and how it is different from regular expressions.

Note: Do not panic if you don’t know what regular expressions are. Regular expressions are patterns used to search for matching strings. Globs look similar and perform a similar function, but are not the same. That’s the key point to understand about globs vs regular expressions.

How Important is this Lesson?

Globbing and quoting are essential topics when using bash. It’s rare to come across a set of commands or a script that doesn’t depend on knowledge of them.

Globbing

Type these commands into the terminal:

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