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Globbing

While our examples for rm only have one argument, it is possible to supply as many files as we want. It would however get very tedious to write out all files one by one so there is a tool we can use to select multiple files. This is called globbing and allows us to select all files that match a certain pattern. As an example rm *.txt deletes all .txt files in the current directory. The * is a placeholder that means anything goes. You can use this symbol wherever in a path.

Here are a few more examples.

Print all files starting with k

cat k*

Print all files start with h and end with s.txt

cat h*s.txt

deletes all files in the Downloads directory, ignoring any directories

rm Downloads/*