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Exclude a string from wildcard search in a shell

Tags:

bash

wildcard

I am trying to exclude a certain string from a file search.

Suppose I have a list of files: file_Michael.txt, file_Thomas.txt, file_Anne.txt.

I want to be able and write something like

ls *<and not Thomas>.txt

to give me file_Michael.txt and file_Anne.txt, but not file_Thomas.txt.

The reverse is easy:

ls *Thomas.txt

Doing it with a single character is also easy:

ls *[^s].txt

But how to do it with a string?

Sebastian

like image 241
steigers Avatar asked Mar 23 '10 13:03

steigers


3 Answers

You can use find to do this:

$ find . -name '*.txt' -a ! -name '*Thomas.txt'
like image 182
Mark Byers Avatar answered Oct 21 '22 23:10

Mark Byers


With Bash

shopt -s extglob
ls !(*Thomas).txt

where the first line means "set extended globbing", see the manual for more information.

Some other ways could be:

find . -type f \( -iname "*.txt" -a -not -iname "*thomas*" \)

ls *txt |grep -vi "thomas"
like image 24
ghostdog74 Avatar answered Oct 22 '22 00:10

ghostdog74


If you are looping a wildcard, just skip the rest of the iteration if there is something you want to exclude.

for file in *.txt; do
    case $file in *Thomas*) continue;; esac
    : ... do stuff with "$file"
done
like image 2
tripleee Avatar answered Oct 22 '22 01:10

tripleee