Question

List at least three differences between wildcard metacharacters and regular expressions.

Answer 1

1.   Wildcard metacharacters are there to be used by the linux shell, whereas regular expressions are mostly used by a text tool like we use even when programming with python or any other language to find the patterns.

2. Including grep, wildcard are applied to all commands and are used in combination of operands while Regular expressions are applied to grep and only few other unix commands.

3. We have more number of regular expression metacharacters than wildcard metacharacters.

4. Wildcard metacharacters have different definitions than regular expression metacharacters

5. Regular expressions are relatively simple computer languages .

For example: find , shell used some filename matching patterns but are not regular expression.