UNIX Commands and Command Shells

In UNIX, wildcards entered on the command line are interpreted by the shell and are therefore expanded before the command is executed. The shell replaces a token containing a wildcard with a list of all of the matching file names, so the command actually receives the expanded list of names.

Command line expansion of wildcards can be overridden by escaping the wildcard characters. For example, to search all subdirectories for files ending with a ".log" extension, use:

Or, to extract only the ".html" files from a ".zip" archive, use:

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