Question

* and ? cannot match ____

(a) /

(b) $

(c) .

(d) / and .

The question was asked during an interview.

This intriguing question originated from Pattern Matching, Escaping and Quoting topic in section The Shell of Unix

Answer 1

Correct answer is (d) / and .

The best I can explain: There are two things which * and ? cannot match. First is, they cannot match filenames starting with a dot (.). Second is, they cannot match / in the pathname. For example, we cannot use cd  /usr?local  to switch to /usr/local. It will generate an error.