Summary

The pattern matching functions that were covered in this chapter are shell pattern matching functions. They provide the capability to expand wildcard filenames and perform case statement selection. When these are combined with the fork(2) and exec(2) functions of the last chapter, you have a good foundation for building a new shell.

The next chapter will delve into regular expressions. This is a more powerful pattern-matching tool that is well equipped to search for text within a file or a text editor's buffer.