Exclude a string from wildcard search in a shell

Question

I am trying to exclude a certain string from a file search.

Suppose I have a list of files: file_Michael.txt, file_Thomas.txt, file_Anne.txt.

I want to be able and write something like

ls *<and not Thomas>.txt

to give me file_Michael.txt and file_Anne.txt, but not file_Thomas.txt.

The reverse is easy:

ls *Thomas.txt

Doing it with a single character is also easy:

ls *[^s].txt

But how to do it with a string?

Sebastian

possible duplicate of [How can I use inverse or negative wildcards when pattern matching in a unix/linux shell?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/216995/how-can-i-use-inverse-or-negative-wildcards-when-pattern-matching-in-a-unix-linu) — Hasturkun, Oct 23 '11 at 10:47

score 19 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 23 '10 at 13:29

19

You can use find to do this:

$ find . -name '*.txt' -a ! -name '*Thomas.txt'

answered Mar 23 '10 at 13:29

Mark Byers

2

You might need to add `-maxdepth 1` to get similar behaviour to a simple wildcard – Toby Speight Jan 10 '18 at 11:58

score 17 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 28 '18 at 18:23

17

With Bash

shopt -s extglob
ls !(*Thomas).txt

where the first line means "set extended globbing", see the manual for more information.

Some other ways could be:

find . -type f \( -iname "*.txt" -a -not -iname "*thomas*" \)

ls *txt |grep -vi "thomas"

edited Aug 28 '18 at 18:23

beaver

answered Mar 23 '10 at 13:28

ghostdog74

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 10 '18 at 11:17

2

If you are looping a wildcard, just skip the rest of the iteration if there is something you want to exclude.

for file in *.txt; do
    case $file in *Thomas*) continue;; esac
    : ... do stuff with "$file"
done

answered Jan 10 '18 at 11:17

tripleee

3 Answers3