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Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 17:47:46 +0100
From: Martijn Koster <mak@webcrawler.com>
To: abbott on blue <jabbott@blue.pca.state.mn.us>
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Unix question.  Regular expressions in commands?
References: <28262143@toto.iv> <3.0.3.32.19971020101324.00a53e90@blue.pca.state.mn.us>
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On Mon, Oct 20, 1997 at 10:13:24AM -0500, abbott on blue wrote:

> I guess this is kind of a newbie unix question.  I have just learned about
> regular expressions within perl and so am trying to use them everyplace. :-)

In unix shells, you use shell patterns, which differ from Perl regular
expressions. Specifically:

     *    Matches any string, including the null string.

     ?    Matches any single character.


> >From a command line what I would like to do is....
> # mv *.[dump asc dat txt clean] tablecreation

That isn't even a Perl regular expression! 

Depending on your shell, you can do that almost like you wrote.
E.g. in bash, it'd be:

  mv *.{dump,asc,dat,txt,clean} tablecreation

-- Martijn Koster, m.koster@pobox.com