Quick Question about Wildcards in Shell and with grep

Schmolch · l33t Joined: 16 Jun 2002 Posts: 746 Location: Germany

Hi All!

The Shell Tutorials say "*" is a wildcard for zero or more but when i want to grep for * it does not see * as wildcard. For grep i have to use the "." character.
Why is this?
I thought grep is a command and the rest what follows is.. err.. shell?

sorry, bad english + low clue = strange questions :-)

BlackEdder · Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 12:37 pm Post subject:

The rest that follows are inputs for grep and dependent on the way grep handles things. Grep uses regexp for matching and . is any character in a regexp. .* would be zero or more of any character.