Pattern matching
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NUTS uses pattern matching in certain commands (eg: ntell, ninvite, whois) 
similar to that used in unix shells. It does NOT use regular expressions.
Why? Because although they are powerful they are also inconsistent (greps
syntax is slightly different to sed which is different to awk and so on..) and
doing simple searches is non intuitive for "normal" users (for example most
people when searching on the name "fred" would understand "f*d" but wouldn't
have a clue what "f.+d" meant).
  NUTS also has a couple of additional operators: ! and =. These switch
case insensitivity on and off respectively.

Some example matches:
    "!fred"  = fred, FRED, FreD ...
    "f*d"    = fred, fed, fd ...
    "f??d"   = fred, ford, ...
    "!f=red" = Fred or fred
    "f*!"    = freD, fred, fuD ...

The operators can also be escaped so that they are treated as normal
characters, eg: "f\*d" , "f*\!", "f\\d"

Since writing pattern matching code is tricky I won't make any guarantees
that this code will always work perfectly but hopefully you will find it
useful nontheless.