(tar.info.gz) wildcards

 
 6.5 Wildcards Patterns and Matching
 ===================================
 
 "Globbing" is the operation by which "wildcard" characters, '*' or '?'
 for example, are replaced and expanded into all existing files matching
 the given pattern.  GNU 'tar' can use wildcard patterns for matching (or
 globbing) archive members when extracting from or listing an archive.
 Wildcard patterns are also used for verifying volume labels of 'tar'
 archives.  This section has the purpose of explaining wildcard syntax
 for 'tar'.
 
    A PATTERN should be written according to shell syntax, using wildcard
 characters to effect globbing.  Most characters in the pattern stand for
 themselves in the matched string, and case is significant: 'a' will
 match only 'a', and not 'A'.  The character '?' in the pattern matches
 any single character in the matched string.  The character '*' in the
 pattern matches zero, one, or more single characters in the matched
 string.  The character '\' says to take the following character of the
 pattern _literally_; it is useful when one needs to match the '?', '*',
 '[' or '\' characters, themselves.
 
    The character '[', up to the matching ']', introduces a character
 class.  A "character class" is a list of acceptable characters for the
 next single character of the matched string.  For example, '[abcde]'
 would match any of the first five letters of the alphabet.  Note that
 within a character class, all of the "special characters" listed above
 other than '\' lose their special meaning; for example, '[-\\[*?]]'
 would match any of the characters, '-', '\', '[', '*', '?', or ']'.
 (Due to parsing constraints, the characters '-' and ']' must either come
 _first_ or _last_ in a character class.)
 
    If the first character of the class after the opening '[' is '!' or
 '^', then the meaning of the class is reversed.  Rather than listing
 character to match, it lists those characters which are _forbidden_ as
 the next single character of the matched string.
 
    Other characters of the class stand for themselves.  The special
 construction '[A-E]', using an hyphen between two letters, is meant to
 represent all characters between A and E, inclusive.
 
    Periods ('.') or forward slashes ('/') are not considered special for
 wildcard matches.  However, if a pattern completely matches a directory
 prefix of a matched string, then it matches the full matched string:
 thus, excluding a directory also excludes all the files beneath it.
(tar.info.gz) wildcards

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