Using grep fl*o does what?

Question

I am a beginner that is working with Unix. One of my homework question is what does using pathname/ grep fl*o do?

I assumed it would match preceding any lines in the directory/file with anything that starts with "f" or "l" or that ends with "o" but when i run the input I am wrong. Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

You should google some regular expression tutorial and start understanding the basic of regex. Grep works with regex.

so fl*o is a regex, it matches:

fo
flo
fllo
fllllllllllllllllo

so f then zero or many l(s) then o