Glob expressions. This is the limited set of wildcard conventions used by early Unix shells for filename matching. There are only three wildcards: *, which matches any sequence of characters (like .* in the other variants); ?, which matches any single character (like . in the other variants); and [...], which matches a character class just as in the other variants. Some shells (csh, bash, zsh) later added {} for alternation. Thus, x{a,b}c matches xac or xbc but not xc. Some shells further extend globs in the direction of extended regular expressions.

Basic regular expressions. This is the notation accepted by the original grep(1) utility for extracting lines matching a given regexp from a file. The line editor ed(1), the stream editor sed(1), also use these. Old Unix hands think of these as the basic or ‘vanilla’ flavor of regexp; people first exposed to the more modern tools tend to assume the extended form described next.

Extended regular expressions. This is the notation accepted by the extended grep utility egrep(1) for extracting lines matching a given regexp from a file. Regular expressions in Lex and the Emacs editor are very close to the egrep flavor.