How to list all files and directories in current directory, whose Second character is a digit

Question

What command is used to list all files and directories in the current directory, where the second character of its name is a digit.

Can we use grep here?

Answer 1

If you want to list all files whose second character is a digit, you can use Bash wildcards like this: ?[0-9]*

where:

• ? represents any single character,
• [0-9] represents any single character in the range 0..9, and finally
• * represents any number of characters.

To list such files on the terminal you can use echo, ls, or any other command that will output its parameters. For example:

• ls -d ?[0-9]*
• echo ?[0-9]*

In the first case (ls), we need to add the -d parameter to list directories themselves, not their contents, in case that the file name we "match" is actually a directory.