List files not matching given string in filename

filterls

I have a directory in which lots of files (around 200) with the name temp_log.$$ are created with several other important files which I need to check.

How can I easily list out all the files and exclude the temp_log.$$ files from getting displayed?

Expected output

$ ls -lrt <exclude-filename-part>
-- Lists files not matching the above given string

I have gone through ls man page but couldn't find anything in this reference. Please let me know if I have missed any vital information here.

Thanks

Best Answer

With GNU ls (the version on non-embedded Linux and Cygwin, sometimes also found elsewhere), you can exclude some files when listing a directory.

ls -I 'temp_log.*' -lrt

(note the long form of -I is --ignore='temp_log.*')

With zsh, you can let the shell do the filtering. Pass -d to ls so as to avoid listing the contents of matched directories.

setopt extended_glob          # put this in your .zshrc
ls -dltr ^temp_log.*

With ksh, bash or zsh, you can use the ksh filtering syntax. In zsh, run setopt ksh_glob first. In bash, run shopt -s extglob first.

ls -dltr !(temp_log.*)

Related Solutions

Linux – How to Use MS-DOS Style Wildcards with ls and mv

One of the fundamental differences between Windows cmd and POSIX shells is who is responsible for wildcard expansions. Shells do all the expansions required before starting the actual commands you asked for. cmd mostly passes the wildcard patterns to the commands unmodified. (I say mostly, since I think there are exceptions, and environment variables are expanded under most circumstances.) This makes writing a rename that would work with the same syntax as in cmd quite tricky.

But there is a rename for Linux - with completely different arguments, check out the man page (which is a bit terse on my system, and rename comes from the util-linux package on my system, which should be widely available). Your first rename would be done like this:

rename .txt .bak *.txt

Note that the shell does the * expansion, so rename itself actually thinks it was invoked like this:

rename .txt .bak file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt ...

So you can guess the single file version:

rename .txt .bak file1.txt

If you don't want to use rename but implement this yourself, you could create a function for that. Assuming you only want to change the file extension, and for single-file rename, look at this:

$ function chext() {
  newext="$1"
  file="$2"
  newfile="${file%.*}$newext"
  echo mv "$file" "$newfile"
}
$ chext .csv test.txt
mv text.txt text.csv

$newfile is built using a substring removal to strip out the original extension, then concatenates the new extension. You can extend that function to handle multiple files relatively easily.

As for your ls question, use the -d switch. This will prevent ls from listing the contents of directories.

Demo:

$ ls -al
total 536
drwx------   3 owner users 528384 Jan  7 17:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 126 owner users  12288 Jan  7 17:26 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f1.csv
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f2.csv
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f3.csv
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f4.csv
drwxr-xr-x   2 owner users   4096 Jan  7 17:33 test
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:27 test.csv

Wildcard rename

$ rename .csv .txt f*
$ ls -al
total 536
drwx------   3 owner users 528384 Jan  7 17:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 126 owner users  12288 Jan  7 17:26 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f1.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f2.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f3.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f4.txt
drwxr-xr-x   2 owner users   4096 Jan  7 17:33 test
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:27 test.csv

Single-file rename

$ rename .txt .csv f1.txt 
$ ls -al
total 536
drwx------   3 owner users 528384 Jan  7 17:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 126 owner users  12288 Jan  7 17:26 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f1.csv
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f2.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f3.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:28 f4.txt
drwxr-xr-x   2 owner users   4096 Jan  7 17:33 test
-rw-r--r--   1 owner users      0 Jan  7 17:27 test.csv

The default `ls`

$ ls -l t*
-rw-r--r-- 1 owner users    0 Jan  7 17:27 test.csv

test:
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 owner users 0 Jan  7 17:33 dont_show_me_please

`ls` that doesn't inspect directories

$ ls -ld t*
drwxr-xr-x 2 owner users 4096 Jan  7 17:33 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 owner users    0 Jan  7 17:27 test.csv

Bash – Find files alphabetically before a given string

if you need all of them

 find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | sort |  awk '$0 > "./reference"'

if you need the first

 find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | sort |  awk '$0 > "./reference"{print;exit}'