What is the method for fuzzy matching strings in the shell?
In a shell, wildcards can be used for fuzzy matching strings. The commonly used wildcards are * and ?.
- It represents matching any characters of any length, and can be used to match prefixes, suffixes, or middle portions of any characters.
- The question mark represents matching a single character, which can be used as a substitute for matching a single character.
Here are a few examples:
- Match any string starting with abc: abc*
- Match any string that ends with ‘abc’: *abc
- Match any string containing “abc”: *abc*
- Match three-character strings that start with ‘a’ and end with ‘c’: a?c
- Match any four-character string that starts with ‘a’ and ends with ‘c’: a??c
These wildcards can be used for fuzzy matching, for example when using the ls command, you can use ls *.txt to list all files ending with .txt in the current directory.