List files with certain extensions with ls and grep

Question

Why not:

ls *.{mp3,exe,mp4}

I'm not sure where I learned it - but I've been using this.

egrep -- extended grep -- will help here

ls | egrep '\.mp4$|\.mp3$|\.exe$'

should do the job.

Use regular expressions with find:

find . -iregex '.*\.\(mp3\|mp4\|exe\)' -printf '%f\n'

If you're piping the filenames:

find . -iregex '.*\.\(mp3\|mp4\|exe\)' -printf '%f\0' | xargs -0 dosomething

This protects filenames that contain spaces or newlines.

OS X find only supports alternation when the -E (enhanced) option is used.

find -E . -regex '.*\.(mp3|mp4|exe)'

the easiest way is to just use ls

ls *.mp4 *.mp3 *.exe

Just in case: why don't you use find?

find -iname '*.mp3' -o -iname '*.exe' -o -iname '*.mp4'

No need for grep. Shell wildcards will do the trick.

ls *.mp4 *.mp3 *.exe

If you have run

shopt -s nullglob

then unmatched globs will be removed altogether and not be left on the command line unexpanded.

If you want case-insensitive globbing (so *.mp3 will match foo.MP3):

shopt -s nocaseglob

In case you are still looking for an alternate solution:

ls | grep -i -e '\\.tcl$' -e '\\.exe$' -e '\\.mp4$'

Feel free to add more -e flags if needed.