112

If I do:

$ ls -R
.:
4Shared/  Cloud/

./4Shared:
UFAIZLV2R7.part3.rar

./Cloud:
UFAIZLV2R7.part2.rar.part
UFAIZLV2R7.part1.rar.part
UFAIZLV2R7.part4.rar.part

If I want to list the .rar files only, and I use grep, it will show me too the .rar.part files, what is not my wish.
I am solving this using find or ls **/*.rar as told in this thread and they work fine, but I would like to learn if it is possible to do it via grep.

I have tried (thinking about EOL):

ls -R | grep ".rar\n"

with no results.
I think that the problem lies in discover if the greping is found at the end of the line, but I am not sure.

Any help out here, please?

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6
  • Why would you want to use grep in this case? Why not find?
    – devnull
    Apr 13, 2014 at 9:31
  • 2
    @devnull, knowing how to detect patterns that are only at the end of a line could be useful in many cases. For example: portability, usage in routers with embedded too-simplistic Linux, usage with UnxUtils for Windows (its find command conflicts with the Windows one) and... learning ;-) . The question is not about "Listing Files in a dir" (that is just a custom example) but rather "Understanding the grep command usage"
    – Sopalajo de Arrierez
    Apr 13, 2014 at 12:09
  • 2
    honestly, if you're counting on the end of a line to be your separator, then you should be using ls -1R.
    – mikeserv
    Apr 13, 2014 at 14:48
  • 2
    And you don't even need grep. See my answer.
    – mikeserv
    Apr 13, 2014 at 15:02
  • @mikeserv, what could happen without the -1R switch. Apparently the results are the same.
    – Sopalajo de Arrierez
    Apr 14, 2014 at 1:01

8 Answers 8

Reset to default
145

The $ anchor matches the end of a line.

ls -R | grep '\.rar$'

You can also use find for this:

find . -name '*.rar'
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7
  • 2
    I didn't realize the "." needs to be escaped in grep. Is it treated as a wild card?
    – thebunnyrules
    Mar 13, 2018 at 15:22
  • 3
    @thebunnyrules "." in regex means one of any character.
    – jordanm
    Mar 13, 2018 at 16:11
  • 2
    This does not work for me on macOS with zsh. Soon as I add the $ I get no matches, when I can see without the $ that I should get a match. ^ works for beginning of the line, but $ doesn't work for EOL
    – swpalmer
    Jan 23, 2022 at 1:44
  • 2
    @jordanm Sorry, the issue is with grep not ls. I'm doing "cat list_of_words.txt | grep '^lunar$'" Without the $ I get a list of 5 words: lunar, lunaria, lunarian, lunarians, lunars .. if I add the $ then I expected to get just "lunar" but I get nothing. Using \b instead of $ works.
    – swpalmer
    Jan 23, 2022 at 3:18
  • 1
    @jordanm Sort of, I confirmed the problem by dumping the hex bytes with 'od -tx1a'. The line separators in that file are /r/n not /n
    – swpalmer
    Jan 24, 2022 at 0:32
14

In addition to your question please note that .rar does not only match ".rar" but matches every single character (including .) before the rar. In this case probably not a problem but . must be escaped in regexes.

ls -R | grep "\.rar$"
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2
  • Did you mean that .asc is like *asc pattern? So it will match, for example, whereverasc.
    – Sopalajo de Arrierez
    Apr 13, 2014 at 0:23
  • 5
    @SopalajodeArrierez No, it does not match every group of characters but every single character, e.g. xrar.
    – Hauke Laging
    Apr 13, 2014 at 0:28
7

You can also instruct grep to look for your string starting at a word boundary. There is such a boundary between . (a non-word character) and r (a word character). Depending on your grep implementation, the word boundary operator can be \b or possibly \< or [[:<:]] (boundary left of a word only), \> or [[:>:]] (right).

$ ls -R | grep '\brar$'

Example

Say I have this sample data.

$ ls -1
afile.rar
xrar
UFAIZLV2R7.part1.rar.part
UFAIZLV2R7.part2.rar.part

This command would find only the file with the .rar extension.

$ ls -R | grep '\brar$'
afile.rar

How this works?

The metacharacter \b is an anchor like the caret and the dollar sign. It matches at a position that is called a "word boundary". This match is zero-length.

Situations where this won't work

If you have files that are named blah-rar these will get detected as well.

$ ls -R | grep '\brar$'
afile-rar
afile.rar

That's because characters other than a alphanumerics are typically considered boundary characters, and so would slip past this approach.

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13
  • Seems to be the same at first sight, but it is slightly different, indeed. Thanks, @slm. Does it bother if I use double quotes " instead of simple quotes?
    – Sopalajo de Arrierez
    Apr 13, 2014 at 1:24
  • 2
    @SopalajodeArrierez - nope works either way. This will find any files that may be named starting w/ .rar. But these won't be an issue with the use of ls -R. Only if you happened to use ls -Ra.
    – slm ♦
    Apr 13, 2014 at 1:26
  • Would one of you be interested in explaining this slight difference to the public?
    – Hauke Laging
    Apr 13, 2014 at 14:02
  • @HaukeLaging The -P switch to grep in my example. That triggers PCRE interpretation of the argument.
    – slm ♦
    Apr 13, 2014 at 14:09
  • 2
    @SopalajodeArrierez - if a file contains a newline character (\n) which is a legal character. The ls -1R will force the files to be displayed in a single column regardless.
    – slm ♦
    Apr 14, 2014 at 1:43
4

Use single quotes to make the $ work as end-of-line. If you want to grep with some variable also, use combination of double and single quotes as below:

grep "$var"'$'

My previous post was deleted saying it is duplicate. Let me explain how this is different.

The other posts mention either full use of double quotes "", or full use of single quotes ''. They both have their own limitations. Following explains it.

The problem with all double quotes is following: grep "pattern$" gives following error: Illegal variable name.

And using all single quotes works, but if you want variable substitution, all single quotes will not work. For example:

If I have string A_BOOK, including other strings in a file FILE. 

$ cat FILE
A_BOOK
B_BOOK_NOT_LAST
C_BOOK

If I set the BOOK to a variable BK 

set BK = BOOK

If I grep with all double quotes, I get the following error: grep "${BK}$" FILE*: 1st $ for variable substitution, 2nd for end of pattern (Illegal variable name).

If I grep with all single quotes, the variable substitution does not happen. grep '${BK}$' FILE returns nothing

If I use a combination of double and single quotes, I get what I expect. Double quotes for variable substitution, and single quotes for end of pattern. 

$ grep "${BK}"'$'  # << gives expected output
A_BOOK
C_BOOK
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2
  • Looks like you're using csh. The "foo$" syntax works fine on sh and family.
    – Olorin
    Jun 26, 2018 at 8:42
  • Yes Olorin. I am using tcsh. Thanks for pointing that.
    – Dinesh Sehra
    Jun 28, 2018 at 7:07
0

Just do : 

ls -1R -I"?" -I"??" -I"???" -I"*[!.][!r][!a][!r]"

You don't need grep at all.

NOTE: The above works... except it still gets at least afile-rar and I don't understand why. I'll leave it here, but I'm not proud of it. In any case, as others have said:

find . '*.rar'
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5
  • This didn't block files named xrar or afile-rar.
    – slm ♦
    Apr 13, 2014 at 15:27
  • I'm still getting the other files in the output.
    – slm ♦
    Apr 13, 2014 at 15:36
  • @slm What other files? I think it might be cause they're too short. I just noticed that myself. I fixed that too.
    – mikeserv
    Apr 13, 2014 at 15:45
  • The files afile-rar and xrar are still being included in the output. No change with your latest mods either. Pesky problem no? It's fun trying to solve it without the regular methods 8-)
    – slm ♦
    Apr 13, 2014 at 16:25
  • @slm Yeah, it's why I come here. I don't understand why the -dash gets through. The xrar thing I could handle, but not the -dash. I don't understand the -dash.
    – mikeserv
    Apr 13, 2014 at 16:32
0

If after following the above and nothing works, it could be due to line-endings. To fix, do: dos2unix pr0n.txt and do your grep again.

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0

I had this problem, and something came to mind suddenly. Terminal color codes... At some stage I actually aliased ls to ls --color=always and that meant that line start and line end may be terminal color escape sequences instead of the content that's visible on the screen.

I have since changed my alias back to ls --color=auto, so ls | grep "^ABC" now works as expected.

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-1

Use pattern followed by $ in double quotes.

Example: I want to find the line that ends with semicolon in a file hey.txt

grep ";$" hey.txt

Output : prints the lines that end with semicolon.

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1
  • 2
    The issue is finding filenames that end in a particular string, not lines in a file.
    – Kusalananda ♦
    Apr 27, 2020 at 6:23

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