A case statement ( 44.5 ) is good at string pattern matching. Its "wildcard" pattern-matching metacharacters work like the filename wildcards ( 1.16 ) in the shell, with a few twists. Here are some examples:
?)
Matches a string with exactly one character like
a
,
3
,
!
, and so on.
?*)
Matches a string with one or more characters (a non-empty string).
[yY]|[yY][eE][sS])
Matches
y
,
Y
or
yes
,
YES
,
YeS
, etc. The
|
means "or."
/*/*[0-9])
Matches a file pathname, like /xxx/yyy/somedir/file2 , that starts with a slash, contains at least one more slash, and ends with a digit.
'What now?')
Matches the pattern
What now?
. The
quotes (
8.14
)
tell the shell to treat the string literally: not to break it at the space and not to treat the
?
as a wildcard.
"$msgs")
Matches the contents of the
msgs
variable. The double quotes let the shell substitute the variable's value; the quotes also protext spaces and other special characters from the shell. For example, if
msgs
contains
first next
, then this would match the same string,
first next
.
-