Array of all files in a directory, except one

Question

Trying to figure out how to include all .txt files except one called manifest.txt.

FILES=(path/to/*.txt) 

Answer 1

You can use extended glob patterns for this:

shopt -s extglob
files=(path/to/!(manifest).txt)

The !(pattern-list) pattern matches "anything except one of the given patterns".

Note that this exactly excludes manifest.txt and nothing else; mmanifest.txt, for example, would still go in to the array.

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^{As a side note: a glob that matches nothing at all expands to itself (see the manual and this question). This behaviour can be changed using the nullglob (expand to empty string) and failglob (print error message) shell options.}