Some types of regular expressions are supported by Glimpse. A regular expression search can be much slower that other searches. The following is a partial list of possible patterns. (For more details see the Glimpse manual pages.)
^joe will match ``joe'' at the beginning of a line.
joe$ will match ``joe'' at the end of a line.
[a-ho-z] matches any character between ``a'' and ``h'' or
between ``o'' and ``z''.
. matches any single character except newline.
c* matches zero or more occurrences of the character ``c''
.* matches any number of wild cards
\* matches the character ``*''.
(\ escapes any of the above special characters.)
Regular expressions are currently limited to approximately 30 characters,
not including meta characters. Regular expressions will generally not
cross word boundaries (because only words are stored in the index). So,
for example, "lin.*ing" will find ``linking'' or ``flinching,'' but
not ``linear programming.''