Tagged Questions

3
votes
2answers
58 views

Sort files by modification time

I've seen many questions and answers here using a construction along the lines of list_dir=`ls -t /path/to/dir/` for i in $list_dir; do or ls -t | while read i; do Now, I know that you shouldn't ...
22
votes
7answers
2k views

why does ls -d also list files, and where is it documented?

when specifying ls --directory a* it should list only directories starting with a* BUT it lists files AND directories starting with a Questions: where might I find some documentation on this, ...
2
votes
2answers
114 views

Working of rm/ls with [0-9]

I am learning the shell commands and came across the short tags eg.[0-9],[[:digit:]] etc.. As a proof of concept i tried deleting all the files with the rm command(i know its not a good practise but i ...
1
vote
1answer
74 views

starting vim with command substitution

I am working on a project on two different machines - one running Mac OSX 10.8.3, and one running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. On my Mac, I can do this: vim $(ls -R */*.@(h|cpp) */*/*.@(h|cpp)) and ...
4
votes
2answers
209 views

Get the complement of the result of an ls command

Let's say I have a directory with multiple files, all of which are either binary files (files with no declared extensions) and source files (.c extension). I do this: $ ls and get: README.md ...
28
votes
5answers
2k views

The result of ls * , ls ** and ls ***

I know using the command ls will list all the directories. But what does the ls * command do ? I used it and it just lists the directories. Is the star in front of ls means how deep it can list the ...
2
votes
3answers
2k views

Unix Command to return all files that end with single digit and TXT extension

Which command returns all files that end with a single digit and have the TXT extension ?
3
votes
3answers
366 views

Using OR patterns in shell wildcards

Contents of my dir are $ ls -lrt total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 user1 admin 19 Oct 8 12:31 night.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 user1 admin 19 Oct 8 12:31 noon.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 user1 admin 38 Oct 8 12:31 day.txt I ...
1
vote
5answers
1k views

ls: Do not show directories that match same pattern in wildcard searches, only files

Supposing I have something like the following, a typical business PC situation: drwxr-xr-x 1 whatever whoever 3 Oct 3 16:40 invoices2009 drwxr-xr-x 1 whatever whoever 4 Oct 3 16:40 ...
12
votes
5answers
4k views

How to match case insensitive patterns with ls?

I would like to list all files matching a certain pattern while ignoring the case. For example, I run the following commands: ls *abc* I need to see all the file that have "abc" as a part of the ...
1
vote
3answers
2k views

List only regular files (but not directories) in current directory

I can use ls -ld */ to list all the directory entries in the current directory. Is there a similarly easy way to just list all the regular files in the current directory? I know I can use find find . ...
7
votes
6answers
4k views

What's the best way to count the number of files in a directory?

If parsing the output of ls is dangerous because it can break on some funky characters (spaces, \n, ... ), what's the best way to know the number of files in a directory? I usualy rely on find to ...
-2
votes
1answer
199 views

Why does this script show all files in the directory and not just PDF files?

I wrote the script below to find the number of PDF files in a given directory. However, it instead shows all the files in the directory: #!bin/bash message="." message1="*.pdf" ls -al $message ...
2
votes
6answers
2k views

Show only hidden files (dot files) in ls alias

I'm using the command ls -a | grep '^\.' for showing only the hidden files. I added the line alias hidden='ls -a | grep '^\.'' # show only hidden files to .bash_aliases file but this does not ...
4
votes
4answers
789 views

file $(ls /usr/bin/* | grep zip) command gives me errors. What's wrong?

I'm a total noob when it comes to unix/linux commands and I decided to read a book. I've reached a chapter where they try to explain how to pass the output of commands as expansions to the shell. ...
6
votes
1answer
7k views

Bash: assign ls | grep to a variable and echo it with a string

I want to assign the result of an expression to a variable and concatenate it with a string, then echo it. Here's what I've got: #!/bin/bash cd ~/Desktop; thefile= ls -t -U | grep -m 1 "Screen Shot"; ...
4
votes
2answers
508 views

How can I search for a file with fixed name length using ls?

In a directory, I have files like lazer_100506 lazer_100707 lazer_091211 lazer_110103 lazer_100406_temp lazer_100622#delete etc How can I get a listing of only the first four files? $ ls ...