| ActiveTcl User Guide |

# Simple pattern matching - "globbing"

By default, lsearch uses the "globbing" method of finding a match. Globbing is the wildcarding technique that most Unix shells use.

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/*]