Speaking with a list

Learning a language takes time, practice, and patience. You must learn in small portions before authoring the next great American novel becomes an option. When you are writing a sentence, you must know the meaning of each word included and how they work together to form a thought. Similarly, in the language of coding, in order to find out what happens when you type ls*.c into your shell, you must first understand what each command means.

Let’s begin with ls. This is what you would type in order to list all the commands in your directory. You would want to list directory items to see what is in each file. The directory is like the book’s table of contents and glossary. It serves as a quick way to locate where information in the code can be found.

Next, we have the asterisk or * this symbol serves as a wildcard. Using this indicates that we are replacing or representing one or more characters. In the shell, the * will match any characters in a filename. By including a wildcard, the list will include anything following the symbol.

Finally, the .c characters simply indicate the file names we are seeking in our list. By pressing enter after stringing all characters together, we are instructing the shell to locate any files that end in .c. The sentence we have created allowed for a search of multiple files within a list.