WILDMAT(3) C LIBRARY FUNCTIONS WILDMAT(3) 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, where any character other than minus sign or close bracket may appear in the set. 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. [^x...y] This matches any character not in the set x...y, which is interpreted as described above. BUGS There is no way to specify a minus sign in a character range. HISTORY Written by Rich $alz in 1986, and posted to Usenet several times since then, most notably in comp.sources.misc in March, 1991. Lars Mathiesen enhanced the multi-asterisk failure mode in early 1991. WILDMAT(3) C LIBRARY FUNCTIONS WILDMAT(3) Rich and Lars increased the efficiency of star patterns and reposted it to comp.sources.misc in April, 1991. This is revision 1.4, dated 91/03/25. SEE ALSO grep(1), regex(3), regexp(3).