BAH! I scoff at your suggestion of using perl!!
(= Just kidding.. I love perl.. but then again, I'm stubborn and like to stretch bash.... actually, lbauer, this is really easy to do. in your test, you'll need to use the [[ ]] construct with an ==. You can see more about double brackets
here.
Here's an example of use to show you how it can be done.
Code:
#!/bin/bash
teamname="Illinois"
if [[ $teamname == Illi* ]]; then
echo "Match"
else
echo "No match"
fi
if [[ $teamname == Illio* ]]; then
echo "Match"
else
echo "No match"
fi
When run:
Code:
~/bash> ./pmatch.sh
Match
No match
Because the second contains an o that should not be.
Happy bashing!