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I seriously can't understand where I'm going wrong with his question. The first part is.

List all the file and directory names in /etc which have 1 or more numbers in their name. Remember to use "-d" in the ls command, and do not descend into subdirectories (i.e. no recursion). Save this list in caine's home directory as a file called "digit". Do the "ls" command when CDed to /etc, thus your names avoid having "/etc/" stuck in front of them.

Which is have done with the following command:

ls -d *[0-9]* > digit

However, the second part of the question is;

Redo the previous question, except this time repeat the exercise when CDed in /home/caine. Save the output in digit2. "digit" and "digit2" should be identical, except in "digit2" all the filenames will begin "/etc/".

I thought the following code would work;

ls -d ../../etc/ *[0-9]* > digit2

When I cat the contents of the file, it appears to have ignored the parameters I have set using the *'s and numbers, I have tried moving the statement around and I am stumped as to why this isn't working.

Any advice, or pref an explanation as to where I am going wrong would be much appreciated.

I know this could be achieved with grep, but even though I've moved on to that and am learning it, I'd still really like to know how I can't get the right syntax for this!

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You added an extra space, which split your glob into two separate arguments:

ls -d ../../etc/ *[0-9]* > digit2
#               ^ space

It should be

ls -d /etc/*[0-9]* > digit2

No need for the ../.. unless you actually like seeing all those dots in the file.

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  • Ah thanks, I put the extra dots in because I am CDed into a different directory and thought it would try and look in the current directory for /etc/ rather than go up two levels. Thanks for pointing out I don't need to space between the input destination and the wildcards
    – Sirus
    Nov 10, 2012 at 19:03
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    @Sirus Paths that start with / are absolute; it doesn't matter what your current directory is. So ls etc is going to look for etc in your current directory; ls /etc is going to look for the etc in the root
    – Michael Mrozek
    Nov 10, 2012 at 19:11
  • Michael, thank you very much for that input, so if I'm deep in a directory somewhere, and I want to do a ls, I can use absolute paths which will start looking from the top (root) of the directory tree?
    – Sirus
    Nov 10, 2012 at 19:18
  • @Sirus Yes absolute paths are written with a leading / and by definition start from the root /.
    – jw013
    Nov 13, 2012 at 20:47

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