How can I get a long listing of text files containing "foo" followed by two digits?

Question

Using metacharacters, I need to perform a long listing of all files whose name contains the string foo followed by two digits, then followed by .txt. foo**.txt will not work, obviously. I can't figure out how to do it.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 26 '14 at 16:36

0

Something like ls foo[0-9][0-9]*.txt of whatever exactly fits your pattern.

answered Oct 26 '14 at 16:36

Michael Kohl

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can you please elaborate a bit what *[!0-9][0-9] does. Thank you for your response. – user2504710 Oct 26 '14 at 16:37
Sorry, copy/paste mistake. Look at the current answer, should be obvious. – Michael Kohl Oct 26 '14 at 16:37
In case it's not: the string `foo`, followed by a character in the range 0 to 9, then another one, then whatever, then `.txt`. – Michael Kohl Oct 26 '14 at 16:38

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 26 '14 at 16:57

Use Valid Shell Globbing with Character Class

To find your substring anywhere in a filename like bar-foo12-baz.txt, you need a wilcard before and after the match. You can also use a character class in your pattern to match a limited range of characters. For example, in Bash:

# Explicit character classes.
ls -l *foo[0-9][0-9]*.txt

# POSIX character classes.
ls -l *foo[[:digit:]][[:digit:]]*.txt

How can I get a long listing of text files containing "foo" followed by two digits?

2 Answers2

Use Valid Shell Globbing with Character Class

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