Tcl Tutorial Lesson 16a

Simple pattern matching - "globbing"

By default, lsearch uses the "globbing" method of finding a match. Globbing is the wildcarding technique that most Unix/Linux shells use as well as the Windows dir command.

globbing wildcards are:

*

Matches any quantity of any character

?

Matches one occurrence of any character

\X

The backslash escapes a special character in globbing just the way it does in Tcl substitutions. Using the backslash lets you use glob to match a * or ?.

[...]

Matches one occurrence of any character within the brackets. A range of characters can be matched by using a range between the brackets. For example, [a-z] will match any lower case letter.

There is also a glob command that you will see in later sections that uses glob pattern matching in directories, and returns a list of the matching files.

Example

# Matches
string match f* foo

# Matches
string match f?? foo

# Doesn't match
string match f foo

# Returns a big list of files on my Debian system.
set bins [glob /usr/bin/*]