Some metacharacters don't match anything in themselves, but instead modify the meaning of a previous character. One such metacharacter is * (asterisk), which is used to match zero or more repeated occurrences of the previous character. Here are some examples:

• ab*c (matches abbbbc but not abqc)
• ab*c (matches abc but not abbqbbc)
• ab*c (matches ac but not cba)
• b[cq]*e (matches bqe but not eb)
• b[cq]*e (matches bccqqe but not bccc)
• b[cq]*e (matches bqqcce but not cqe)
• b[cq]*e (matches bbbeee)
• .* (matches any string)
• foo.* (matches any string that begins with foo)

The line ac matches the regex ab*c because the asterisk also allows the preceding expression (c) to appear zero times. Note that the * regex metacharacter is interpreted in a fundamentally different way than the * glob character.