List files that only have number in names

Question

I have a directory with these files:

1.html 22.html 333.html zxc.html

I want to get a list of the html files that only have digits in their name:

1.html 22.html 333.html

I thought this would work

find . -regex '^[0-9]+\.html'

or

ls -al | grep -E '^[0-9]+\.html$'

But I get nothing. My idea is to get the html files with only digits in their names and pass them to sed to do a substitution.I'm using linux and bash

Answer 1

find's -regex matches against the whole path, not just the filename (I myself seem to forget this once for every time I use it).

Thus, you can use:

find . -regex '.*/[0-9]+\.html'

(^ and $ aren't necessary since it always tests against the whole path.)

Using find also has advantages when you want to do something with the files, e.g. using the built-in -exec, -print0 and pipe to xargs -0 or even (using Bash):

while IFS='' read -r -d '' file
do
  # ...
done < <(find . -regex '.*/[0-9]+\.html' -print0)

echo with a glob, ls|grep, etc. tend to stop working when filenames contain spaces (or even newlines) (which I realise won't happen in this case; it's more of a matter of future-proofing and making good habits).