Linux – How to select and copy file names in the command line without using the mouse

Copy-paste is older than the mouse. The first unix editor, ed, had the t command to copy a bunch of lines to a different location. In vi, there are various commands to cut, yank and paste text. To copy text between files, you would save the text to copy in a temporary file and import that temporary file in the target document, e.g. with w and r in ed (:w and :r in vi). To include the output of a command in a file, you would redirect its output (mycommand >file or mycommand >>file) and import that file into your document; vi introduced the ! command and friends to directly insert the output without requiring a temporary file.

Loading a man page into Vim or Emacs and copy-pasting from it is routine for Vim/Emacs users. Web browsers didn't exist until Unix was old enough to drink, but the same principle applies anywhere: the clipboard is older than window environments. What window environments brought was cross-application copy-paste, which could be done with only a little more effort through files.

If the first character of file name is printable but neither alphanumeric nor whitespace you can use [[:punct:]] glob operator:

$ ls *.txt
f1.txt  f2.txt  ♫abc.txt
$ ls [[:punct:]]*.txt
♫abc.txt