Bash script and regex issue

Question

Let's imagine that on my server, i have the following files :

foo@bar:/var/log/foo$ ls
fooFile1 fooFile2 logFile logFile.1 logFile.2

I wanted to create an archive containing every file but logFile.*. So I came up with the command :

foo@bar:~$ tar -czf foo.tar.gz /var/log/foo/!(logFile.*)

And it works fine ! However, when trying to create a script which does the same job :

#!/bin/bash

tar -czf foo.tar.gz /var/log/foo/!(logFile.*)

I came across the following error :

./test.sh: line 3: syntax error near unexpected token '('
./test.sh: line 3: 'tar -czf foo.tar.gz /var/log/foo/!(logFile.*)'

The problem is not tar related (I met the same issue using ls instead of tar)

I don't understand where this error is coming from. Could anyone tell me where i am wrong ?

Met on Ubuntu 12.04

Answer 1

Place this line just below shebang:

shopt -s extglob

to enable extended glob option in your script.

!(logFile.*) is extended glob pattern that requires enabling extglob