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

Question

Say I want to copy the contents of a directory excluding files and folders whose names contain the word \'Music\'.

cp [exclude-matches] *Music* /target_direc         


        

Answer 1

Not in bash (that I know of), but:

cp `ls | grep -v Music` /target_directory

I know this is not exactly what you were looking for, but it will solve your example.

Answer 2

One solution for this can be found with find.

$ mkdir foo bar
$ touch foo/a.txt foo/Music.txt
$ find foo -type f ! -name '*Music*' -exec cp {} bar \;
$ ls bar
a.txt

Find has quite a few options, you can get pretty specific on what you include and exclude.

Edit: Adam in the comments noted that this is recursive. find options mindepth and maxdepth can be useful in controlling this.

Answer 3

The following works lists all *.txt files in the current dir, except those that begin with a number.

This works in bash, dash, zsh and all other POSIX compatible shells.

for FILE in /some/dir/*.txt; do    # for each *.txt file
    case "${FILE##*/}" in          #   if file basename...
        [0-9]*) continue ;;        #   starts with digit: skip
    esac
    ## otherwise, do stuff with $FILE here
done

1. In line one the pattern /some/dir/*.txt will cause the for loop to iterate over all files in /some/dir whose name end with .txt.

2. In line two a case statement is used to weed out undesired files. – The ${FILE##*/} expression strips off any leading dir name component from the filename (here /some/dir/) so that patters can match against only the basename of the file. (If you're only weeding out filenames based on suffixes, you can shorten this to $FILE instead.)

3. In line three, all files matching the case pattern [0-9]*) line will be skipped (the continue statement jumps to the next iteration of the for loop). – If you want to you can do something more interesting here, e.g. like skipping all files which do not start with a letter (a–z) using [!a-z]*, or you could use multiple patterns to skip several kinds of filenames e.g. [0-9]*|*.bak to skip files both .bak files, and files which does not start with a number.

Answer 4

If you want to avoid the mem cost of using the exec command, I believe you can do better with xargs. I think the following is a more efficient alternative to

find foo -type f ! -name '*Music*' -exec cp {} bar \; # new proc for each exec



find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*Music*' -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 -i cp {} dest/

Answer 5

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