Find files using ls and wildcards

fileslswildcards

pwd : ../bin under bin I have a directory called datafiles.

Use meta characters and the ls -lL command (with lower and upper case L) to list all filenames under the datafiles directory that contain a dot . with the letter 'f' or 'u' anywhere after the dot.

I tried: ls -lL datafiles *.*f*u

ls -lL datafiles .[f*u]

Thank you for answering. Unfortunately, none of the solutions worked the way I wanted it.

By clarifying the question, /bin/datafiles/file.backup is the root to the directory. From the /bin directory, the command I used is ls -lL datafiles followed by meta characters.

I'm looking for file.backup that has a dot and followed by f or u, not directly followed by f or u (anywhere after the dot), and not ending by f or u.

Best Answer

This looks for files in the data directory that contain a dot followed by f or u but not ending in f or u:

ls -lL datafiles/*.*[fu]*[^fu]

Answer to version 1 of this question

You wrote "f or u". To write that in a glob, use [fu]. To also insist that the f or u be preceded by a dot, try:

ls -lL .*[fu]* *.*[fu]*

The first glob above, .*[fu]*, expands to files that start with a dot (which means that they are normally 'hidden'). The second, *.*[fu]*, expands to files that have a dot somewhere in the name but do not begin with dot.

The hidden files generally serve as configuration files for various programs. If you don't want to see them, and one usually doesn't, then omit the first glob and use simply:

ls -lL *.*[fu]*

More on globs

*.*f*u expands to a file name that contains a dot followed (not necessarily immediately) by an f and ends with a u. In other words, this glob requires that both f and u be present in the filename and that they appear in the order f then u.

Normally, * means zero or more of any character. As a special case, the above does not match files that start with a dot because such files are, by convention, "hidden."
.[f*u] expands to a file name that consists of a dot immediately followed by one of the characters f, *, or u (and nothing else after that). Because the star is inside the square brackets, it loses its usual meaning of zero or more characters and becomes a literal *.

Related Solutions

Bash – Using OR patterns in shell wildcards

You don't even need extended globbing enabled to do what you want. This will work in bash:

ls {day*,night*}

Bash – Shell wildcards and dot files

By default, bash (the shell) doesn't expand a filename beginning with a dot (considered a hidden file) unless the dot is explicitly specified. Since [.] is a pattern, rather than a literal character, it doesn't trigger the display of hidden files and so ls -d [.][!.]?* doesn't match anything.

You can change this default behavior by running shopt -s dotglob, which sets the option to always includes hidden files when expanding filename patterns (known as "globbing").

Example (the dollar sign at the beginning of the line indicates the shell prompt; don't type it in):

$ touch .foo
$ ls -d .[!.]?*
.foo
$ ls -d [.][!.]?*
ls: cannot access [.][!.]?*: No such file or directory
$ shopt -s dotglob
$ ls -d [.][!.]?*
.foo

The issue with echo [D] is that expansion doesn't happen if no filename is matched. Since you didn't have a file named D when you tried it, echo was given, and echoed, what you literally entered.

An example of pathname expansion only occurring when a filename matches:

$ touch apple
$ echo a*
apple
$ rm apple
$ echo a*
a*

If you delete all of the files which match [D]*, then echo [D]* will give you [D]*.