What does rpm -qa |grep th* (as compared to rpm -qa |grep th) display?
 

rpm -qa |grep th displays packages with "th" in their name.

What do rpm -qa |grep th* and rpm -qa |grep *th display? I don't quite understand the output. rpm -qa |grep th* seems to display any package with "t" in the name?!

Some concept teaching required here :)

Thanks !

Grep takes regular expressions, so "grep th*" is actually equivalent to "any line that has the letter 't' and any number of 'h'(including 0)".
If you want to grep for packages that start with "th", try

Could you elaborate on "regular expressions"? Does "grep th3" refers to "any line that has the letter 't' and 3 instances of 'h'"?

Thanks !