What is the format of <pattern> in git-branch --list

Question

As title, I have read the manual but in vain.

What I found is that a * can be wildcard pattern matching.

git branch --list 'issues*6'  issues/586  issues/616 

However, it's found by myself instead of mentioned in manual page.

I wonder what is the real format of <pattern>.

Answer 1

Quoting from that same manual page you linked:

If --list is given, or if there are no non-option arguments, existing branches are listed; the current branch will be highlighted with an asterisk. Option -r causes the remote-tracking branches to be listed, and option -a shows both local and remote branches. If a <pattern> is given, it is used as a shell wildcard to restrict the output to matching branches. If multiple patterns are given, a branch is shown if it matches any of the patterns. Note that when providing a <pattern>, you must use --list; otherwise the command is interpreted as branch creation.

So the answer, at least according to the documentation, is that "it is used as a shell wildcard". This assumes, of course, that you know what the phrase "shell wildcard" means—and more importantly, it's wrong, since a straight shell wildcard would not match across the /.

The documentation should say something like: "The pattern acts much like a shell wildcard / glob pattern, except that slashes are not treated specially, so that a*b matches both accb and ac/cb, and a[bc/]* matches all of a/d, abcd, ac/cb, and accb."

Examples:

$ git branch -a   a/d   abcd   ac/cb   accb * master $ git branch --list 'a*b'   ac/cb   accb $ git branch --list 'a[bc/]*'   a/d   abcd   ac/cb   accb $