How can I use inverse or negative wildcards when pattern matching in a unix/linux shell?

by

In Bash you can do it by enabling the extglob option, like this (replace ls with cp and add the target directory, of course)

~/foobar> shopt extglob
extglob        off
~/foobar> ls
abar  afoo  bbar  bfoo
~/foobar> ls !(b*)
-bash: !: event not found
~/foobar> shopt -s extglob  # Enables extglob
~/foobar> ls !(b*)
abar  afoo
~/foobar> ls !(a*)
bbar  bfoo
~/foobar> ls !(*foo)
abar  bbar

You can later disable extglob with

shopt -u extglob

More Related Contents:

  1. What expands to all files in current directory recursively?
  2. Correct Bash and shell script variable capitalization
  3. While loop stops reading after the first line in Bash
  4. Pipe output and capture exit status in Bash
  5. Redirect stderr and stdout in Bash [duplicate]
  6. Which characters need to be escaped when using Bash?
  7. How do I run a shell script without using “sh” or “bash” commands?
  8. How can I suppress all output from a command using Bash?
  9. Assignment of variables with space after the (=) sign?
  10. How to get a password from a shell script without echoing
  11. Exit Shell Script Based on Process Exit Code [duplicate]
  12. How can I use Bash syntax in Makefile targets?
  13. Pass all variables from one shell script to another?
  14. Delete files older than 10 days using shell script in Unix [duplicate]
  15. Checking if output of a command contains a certain string in a shell script
  16. Bash conditional based on exit code of command
  17. Simulating ENTER keypress in bash script
  18. Get just the filename from a path in a Bash script [duplicate]
  19. Rename multiple files in shell [duplicate]
  20. Is there a way to make bash job control quiet?
  21. Execute a shell function with timeout
  22. Convert Unix timestamp to a date string
  23. Using Bash to display a progress indicator (spinner) [duplicate]
  24. When does command substitution spawn more subshells than the same commands in isolation?
  25. Extract version number from a string
  26. How do I get both STDOUT and STDERR to go to the terminal and a log file?
  27. -bash: __git_ps1: command not found
  28. Use GNU find to show only the leaf directories
  29. docker entrypoint running bash script gets “permission denied”
  30. What does `kill -0 $pid` in a shell script do?

Leave a Comment