Globbing is sometimes used to refer to pattern matching based on wildcard characters. The noun “glob” is used to refer to a particular pattern, e.g. “use the glob *.log to match all those log files”. Its notation is simpler than regular expressions, and without their expressive power.

Wildcard matching

?
A ? (not between brackets) matches any single character.
*
A * (not between brackets) matches any string, including the empty string.
#
A line starts with # serves as a comment.
!
Prefix ! negates the pattern.
{}, {!}
{a,b,c} matches any one of a, b or c.
{!glob} matches anything that does not match glob.
[], [^]
[abc] matches any character in the set a, b or c.
[^abc] matches any character not in the set a, b or c.
[a-z] matches any character in the range a to z, inclusive (A leading or trailing dash will be interpreted literally).
/
Pattern ends with a / matches pathname.
For example, Documentation/*.html matches Documentation/git.html but not Documentation/ppc/ppc.html or tools/perf/Documentation/perf.html.
**
A leading **/ matches in all directories. E.g. **/foo/bar matches file or directory bar anywhere that is directly under directory foo.
A trailing /** matches everything inside. E.g. abc/** matches all files inside directory “abc”, relative to the location
/**/ matches zero or more directories. E.g. a/**/b matches a/b, a/x/b, a/x/y/b and so on.
Other consecutive asterisks are considered invalid.

References