In many options, GenPatch allows you to use file patterns. Patterns are a flexible way to tell GenPatch things about many files at the same time without listing them all explicitly but referring to their similar file names instead. We make an attempt to explain their use here.
A standard pattern is a filename that optionally may contain "place holders". Such place holders are "*" and "?". If you are familiar with using the command line, you will probably already know that these place holders allow to match on file names.
The "`?" occurring in a pattern will stand for any character. So if you have e.g. three files, called "A.DAT", "A.DBT" and "B.DAT" the pattern "A.D?T" will match "A.DAT" and "A.DBT". It will not match "B.DAT" since the first character is not the same as in the pattern. Another example is the pattern "Basename.???". This pattern will match filenames like "Basename.DAT", but not "Basename.XY" since three characters were required to follow after the dot.
A variable length match of any characters is accomplished by using "*" in your pattern. If you e.g. use "Basename.*", this will match "Basename.XY" and "Basename.DAT", but also "Basename." since any character is fulfilled by no character also. One or more characters are matched by "?*" if you need to be certain to exclude no character matching of "*".
Standard filenames are of course also filenames. So when this documentation says -some-option=pattern it actually means that you could use placeholders while using -some-option=filename for your convenience.
Note: The use of Perl Regular Expressions for patterns is not yet documented here.