Wildcard in bash script

Question

I have a bash script to retrieve files from ftp.

Now the files have one part a date string in the filename, but also undefined numbers that changes on every file. I want

Answer 1

With the ? characters you include not only numbers, but any character. So if you want to include only numbers, you can replace the ??? characters with [0-9][0-9][0-9].

Example:

If you have the following files:

$ ls 0123vel.h5 0333vel.h5 033vel.h5 0pecvel.h5

with this ls you show the correct files:

$ ls 0[0-9][0-9][0-9]vel.radar.h5 0123vel.h5 0333vel.h5

Answer 2

It sounds like you want to handle multiple files, but your script can only handle one file at a time. Furthermore, because you specified FTP, it sounds like the files are on the FTP server, in which case local filename expansion will not help.

You probably want to use the ftp client's mget command to download multiple files matching a pattern on the remote side. You also want to include $TIMESTAMP as part of the pattern. I'd suggest something like this:

ftp remote-hostname <<EOF
cd path/to/log/files
prompt
mget ${TIMESTAMP}0???vel.radar.h5
bye
EOF

This uses a here-document (<<EOF to EOF on a line by itself) to supply input text to the ftp commmand. It will expand the variable $TIMESTAMP so it becomes part of the mget command, e.g. if $TIMESTAMP was 12345, the ftp command will be told mget 123450???vel.radar.h5.