Zero or one

The zero or one operator (?) matches occurrences of the preceding character zero or one time. For example, we use ? to mark the e as an optional character to match the Jean or Jan string, as follows:

$ echo -e "Jean\nJan\nJeean" | awk '/Je?an/'

The output on execution of the preceding code is as follows:

Jean
Jan

A summary of the unary operator for repetition is as follows: