What is the meaning of asterisk, backslash, colon and two in (*\:2)?
*\:2,*T
is the glob pattern of files to list. To understand it, we need to remember a few things:
:
has to be escaped in the shell, becoming\:
- File names can easily contain commas
So *\:2,*T
would e.g. match a file called TranscationNumber:2,EventType:XYT
EDIT
From the comments, the necessity (or not) of escaping the :
needs a few words: It is not strictly necessary to escape the :
sign, but bash itself suggests it when autocompleting.
List all files that match the wildcard pattern *:2,*T
There the wildcard *
matches anything (any number of all possible characters)
:2,
are characters that need to be present in the file/directory names.
The colon :
is a special character that needs to be escaped, hence the form of \:2,
.
The file/directory names need to end with a T
.
File names that would match would be
:2,T
a:2,T
a:2,bT
abbY-$fafaf:2,<hskjhsgdfhjk>T
As others have noted, this will list in long format, files containing :2
, and ending in T
This looks like a search in a Maildir folder for files that were deleted (trashed). However, for robustness it should have had another *
at the end, though. New flags with a later alphabetical position could be added, and Dovecot for instance adds another field with the file size at the end.
- https://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html