In the previous chapter, you learned about the file maintence commands
cp, mv, and rm. Occasionally, you want to deal with more than
one file at once--in fact, you might want to deal with many files at once.
For instance, you might want to copy all the files beginning with
data into a directory called ~/backup. You could do this by either
running many cp commands, or you could list every file on one command
line. Both of these methods would take a long time, however, and you have a
large chance of making an error.
A better way of doing that task is to type:
As you can see, the asterix told cp to take all of the files
beginning with data and copy them to ~/backup. Can you guess
what cp d*w ~/backup would have done?