How to cp all things that DO NOT begins with abc?

Question

Please don't give me a solution that leverages other commands like grep or ls or sed.

I want to know whether cp with a regular expression can do this.

Answer 1

cp(1) itself has no "regular expression" support; the functionality you're depending on is probably Pathname Expansion (globbing) in Bash. Check the bash(1) manpage to find extglob syntax like this:

shopt -s extglob
cp !(abc*) destination/

Answer 2

cp -t elsewhere [^a]* a[^b]* ab[^c]*

Note that this:

• doesn't involve regular expressions at all
• involves shell globbing instead, but
• is performed by bash not cp, and
• is a hand-inversion of abc*