WILDMAT

Section: C Library Functions (3)
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NAME

wildmat - perform shell-style wildcard matching

SYNOPSIS

int
wildmat(text, pattern)
    char               *text;
    char               *pattern;

DESCRIPTION

Wildmat compares the
text against the pattern and returns non-zero if the pattern matches the text. The pattern is interpreted similar to shell filename wildcards, and not as a full regular expression such as those handled by the grep(1) family of programs or the regex(3) or regexp(3) set of routines.

The pattern is interpreted according to the following rules:

\x: Turns off the special meaning of x and matches it directly; this is used mostly before a question mark or asterisk, and is not valid inside square brackets.
?: Matches any single character.
*: Matches any sequence of zero or more characters.
[x...y]: Matches any single character specified by the set x...y. A minus sign may be used to indicate a range of characters. That is, [0-5abc] is a shorthand for [012345abc]. More than one range may appear inside a character set; [0-9a-zA-Z._] matches almost all of the legal characters for a host name. The close bracket, ], may be used if it is the first character in the set. The minus sign, -, may be used if it is either the first or last character in the set.
[^x...y]: This matches any character not in the set x...y, which is interpreted as described above. For example, [^]-] matches any character other than a close bracket or minus sign.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

There is no way to end a range with a close bracket.

HISTORY

Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@bbn.com> in 1986, and posted to Usenet several times since then, most notably in comp.sources.misc in March, 1991.

Lars Mathiesen <thorinn@diku.dk> enhanced the multi-asterisk failure mode in early 1991.

Rich and Lars increased the efficiency of star patterns and reposted it to comp.sources.misc in April, 1991.

Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au> added minus sign and close bracket handling in June, 1991.

This is revision 1.7, dated 91/07/05.

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Time: 21:52:24 GMT, February 02, 2023