🧩 Shell Glob Puzzle Match: Can You Select the Right Files?

🧩 Shell Glob Puzzle Match: Can You Select the Right Files?

Think you know how shell globbing works? Time to prove it.

In this interactive challenge, you’re presented with a glob pattern like *.txt or file[1-3].* and a selection of filenames. Your job: match just the ones that the shell would expand in a real terminal session 🧠.

We’ll track your score in real time, giving feedback on every move. You’ll gain intuition for tricky wildcards like ?, [], and !, and how globs differ from full regex.

Perfect for devs, sysadmins, Linux fans, and anyone writing bash scripts or Makefiles regularly.

Launch the Glob Puzzle Challenge

Want more? Check out Grep Like a Pro or our Bash Scripting Puzzle Box 🔧

Skylar Pearce

My name is Skylar Pearce, I have been working as a System Administror since 2013 as well some side consulting work. During my career I have worked with everything from Active Directory and vCenter to configuring routers and switches and phone systems, documenting and scripting my way through the whole thing. I have a Security+ certification and am currently working on my PenTest+. Throughout my career I have gained almost all of my knowledge from blogs like this. It is now time for me to pay it back. Over time I have gathered scripts and tricks over the years that I will share on this site. A lot of the posts here will be mainly reference posts, some will be full on how to’s. I am happy to go into more depth on any other topics I go over here, just make a comment on a post. I will do my best to post once a day on weekdays but as I run out of ideas it may slow down. My WordPress skills are still growing so the site will likely get better over time as I learn. You can reach me at contact@allthesystems.com or on LinkedIn