File and operation masks

A file mask picks out files. You type one in the Select Files and Filter dialogs, in the transfer settings, and in script commands such as get or the -filemask switch. An operation mask does a different job: it decides the name a file gets at its destination.

Wildcards

Pattern	Matches	Example
*	any run of characters, also none	report*.pdf
?	exactly one character	img_????.png
[abc]	one of the listed characters	v[123].txt
[a-z]	one character in the range	log-[0-9].gz

Every other character stands for itself. To match a literal *, ? or [, put it inside brackets: notes[*].txt.

Masks ignore letter case, so *.JPG also selects photo.jpg. The exception is the wildcard in a local source of put or lls: linscp hands that one to the file system, which on Linux tells upper and lower case apart.

Two forms behave specially. *.* matches every name, even one without a dot. *. matches only names that have no extension.

Size and age

Add a constraint right after the name part, without a space:

• >500K, <2G: larger or smaller than a size. Units are K, M and G; directories count as size zero.
• >2026-01-01, <2026-03-31 18:00: modified after or before a date, with an optional time.
• >7D, <12H: modified within, or longer ago than, a period. Units are Y years, D days, H hours, N minutes and S seconds. Add a second S to round down to the start of the unit: >0DS means since midnight. You can write today and yesterday for 0DS and 1DS.

Use >= and <= to include the limit. Chain several constraints for a range: *.log>=2026-01-01<2026-02-01. In a script, put a mask that holds a space inside double quotes. Directory masks take no constraints.

Several masks, include and exclude

Separate masks with ; or ,: *.html; *.css selects both kinds.

A | splits the mask into an include part and an exclude part. Anything the exclude part matches is left out, even when the include part matches it too:

*.php; *.inc | test_*; *.bak

Either part may be empty. | *.tmp takes everything except temporary files. To use ;, , or | literally, write it twice.

Lists and | work in -filemask and in the dialogs. The file names you pass to commands such as get or rm accept only one simple mask each.

Directories and paths

End a mask with / to make it match directories: cache/ matches every directory called cache, at any depth, and */ matches all of them. When a transfer excludes a directory, linscp skips its whole contents without looking inside. So -filemask="|*/" copies the files of the top directory and nothing below it.

Put a path before the name to match by location:

• */logs/*.txt matches text files in any directory called logs;
• ./build/ matches build at the root of the transfer or synchronization, wherever that root is;
• /var/www/html/tmp/ matches that one directory only.

A full path is compared with the complete path of each file, never with a path relative to the transfer root. For synchronization, prefer partial or ./ paths, because a full path only exists on one of the two sides.

Excluding every file of a directory still creates the directory, empty, at the target. In a script, the ExcludeEmptyDirectories raw transfer setting avoids that; -filemask does not have this problem.

Operation masks

When the last argument of get, put, cp or mv is not a plain name, it works as an operation mask. linscp applies it to each file separately, to the part before the last dot and to the extension in turn:

Mask	index.html becomes
*.bak	index.bak
*.html.orig	index.html.orig
old_*	old_index.html
?????.htm	index.htm
*.* or *	index.html (unchanged)

In an operation mask, * copies the rest of the original part and ? copies one character of it. Put \ before *, ? or \ to write that character literally. A mask that holds a directory as well works as both: /srv/archive/*.old moves the files there and renames them.

For how commands pick their targets, see put and mv.