Table names with period and asterisk in Clone Exclusion table

[jparrish8890]

Apologies if this has already been answered, but I cannot find it.  I am about to do a clone and am trying to add an exclude rule, however, when I look at the existing tables that are excluded in the target instance, some of them have an asterisk preceded by a period (ie: table.*) and some have only the table name (ie: table).  I am presumming that this is some sort of wildcard as to include child tables or possibly tables with similiar names?  What is throwing me off is the period?  I would think that if it is supposed to be for wildcard matches you would only need the asterisk without the period?  Or is this for child tables that are of any name?  Thank you for your help.

[ARG645 · Accepted solution]

jparrish8890

Interesting question. The name in the Exclude table is a Regex. So for example syslog.* will exclude all the child tables of syslog table and tables whose name start with syslog.

[ .* ]  is used to detect a full match of the preceding token, in our example the logic will search for the names that begin with syslog 

syslog - Match found

syslo - Match not found

sys - Match not found

syslog_test - Match found

 if our regular expression was just syslog*  (without the period)then

syslog - Match found

syslo - Match found

sys - Match found

syslog_test - Match found

Hope it clears your confusion.

Thank you,

Aman Gurram

[James Fricker]

If the regex was syslog* then the * applies to the 'g' only. So the only tables that would match would be

syslo

syslog

syslogg

sysloggg

syslogggg

etc

you would NOT get a match for 'sys', nor would you get a match for syslog_test as I suspect it is a whole string match. In other words ^syslog*$

[jparrish8890]

Both these answers are great!  Thank you... completely clears up the confusion