How can I use a wildcard to match just files, not directories?

Question

I have a folder called home/homeLife

I have a file called home1 home2 and home3 stored in /home

I want to move all files that start with home* to home/homeLife/..

I typed

mv home* /home/homeLife
cannot move homeLife into subdirectory of itself

My question: How can I exclude directories?

Answer 1

With zsh, use glob qualifiers:

mv home*(.) dst 

moves only regular files.

While

mv home*(^/) dst 

moves files of any type except directories.

mv home*(^-/) dst

would also exclude symlinks to directories.

Answer 2

You can use find. The following should work.

find . -name home\* -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} /home/homeLife/. \;

Answer 3

You can use bash extended globs:

shopt -s extglob                ## activate extglogs if not yet done
mv  home!(*Life) homeLife/      ## !(p1|...) = anything except one of the patt

Answer 4

You're close already. To move your files home1, home2, home3 use the globbing pattern home?.

mv home? /home/homeLife/

The ? denotes any single character, while the * denotes any amount of characters (including none).

Answer 5

Portably you can prune your glob match list:

set --; cd /home
for f in ./home*
do  [ ! -L "$f" ] && 
      [ -f "$f" ] && 
      set "$@" "$f"
done
[ "$#" -eq 0 ] || mv "$@" ./homeLife

Answer 6

Of course, if you had only 3 files, you could just do

 mv home1 home2 home3 homeLife

Sometimes it is easier to do things manually than read the documentation. If you really had a large number of files named home*, then one trick that I use (that is now part of bash) is to expand all the glob matches and then manually delete the matches I don't want. To expand a glob, type Ctrl+x * after you type the glob expression. It will expand on the command line, and then you manually fix it.

For example, in my directory, I have a lot of "test" files and I want to cat all of them besides test2 to a new file:

cat test*

Now type Ctrl+x *, and it expands to

cat test test10 test11 test12 test13 test14 test15 test16 test17 test2 test20 test21 test22 test23 test24 test25 test26 test27 test28 test29 test3 test30 test31 test32 test33 test34 test35 test36 test37 test38 test4 test5 test6 test7 test8 test9 testa testb testbuild testc testd teste testf

Then cursor back and remove test2 with 5 backspaces, and then add > test_all to the end of the command line.

cat test test10 test11 test12 test13 test14 test15 test16 test17 test20 test21 test22 test23 test24 test25 test26 test27 test28 test29 test3 test30 test31 test32 test33 test34 test35 test36 test37 test38 test4 test5 test6 test7 test8 test9 testa testb testbuild testc testd teste testf > test_all

There are a bunch of other features of Ctrl+x, but this is the only one I remember.