Bash globbing - How to match 1 or more characters? (solved)

[disciple]

1. I can match any file except one ending in [sometext].txt
e.g.

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for i in !(*-out).txt
 do
  ( echo "$i" ) &
 done

I am trying to match [sometext].[any extension], not specifically .txt
If I use something like this:

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!(*-out).*

Then it does what I want except it also matches . and .. (because * matches 0 or more characters).
Is there a way to match 1 or more characters, or specifically exclude . and ..?
Without specifying every possible character in [] like this?:

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!(*-out).+([a-z])

2. (solved, presented for interested readers)
I wanted to do stuff with the filename and the extension from the successful matches, and when a file had multiple extensions e.g. somefile.csv.txt I wanted to consider them all as one, not just take the last one as the extension.
Reading the docs at https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/param ... ution.html showed this is the solution:

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[do something with $i] >"${i%%.*}-out.${i#*.}"

The key is %% vs %, and # vs ##.

[MochiMoppel]

I am trying to match [sometext].[any extension], not specifically .txt

If I understand correctly you want to exclude all *-out files that have an extension, so why not:

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for i in *-out

This would match all -out files with an extension (1 or more characters after period):

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for i in *-out.?*

This matches all non-hidden files, except -out files which have an extension:

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shopt -s extglob
for i in !(*-out.+(*))

[technosaurus]

Good advice from Mochi. If you want more flexibility, take a dabble at awk. It's part of busybox, supports real regular expressions, arrays and programming constructs. It's also pretty easy to learn if you know shell and a good stepping stone toward learning C.

[s243a]

Just as a quick skim it seems like the original question was answered. That said you can use regular expressions in bash without using external tools like AWK. For instance see this stack overflow thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/187 ... t/18710850

However, one thing I"m not sure about is which regular expression syntax this supports. For instance does it support full PERL compatible regular expression or alternatively an older form of regular expressions.

[MochiMoppel]

However, one thing I"m not sure about is which regular expression syntax this supports.

POSIX extended regular expression

[disciple]

Oh dear - I haven't got any notifications for this or any other topic in the last month. And they're not in my gmail spam folder either. Are you guys getting notifications?

I am trying to match [sometext].[any extension], not specifically .txt

If I understand correctly you want to exclude all *-out files that have an extension, so why not:

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for i in *-out

But I also want to include all files that don't have the -out
I guess something that simple would work if you just did it in two steps (first the -out.* and then the non -out), but we want to be more clever than that.

This would match all -out files with an extension (1 or more characters after period):

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for i in *-out.?*

This matches all non-hidden files, except -out files which have an extension:

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shopt -s extglob
for i in !(*-out.+(*))

Ah. That is most of the way there, although I think it is actually more complicated than it needs to be - it looks like this works identically:

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 for i in !(*-out.*)

So my problem was just that I hadn't tried moving the .* inside the first set of brackets ().

I can of course include the hidden files too which `shopt dotglob`

And it does need to be used with a ?, so it doesn't exclude a file with trailing dot but no extension.
This looks good:

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#  shopt dotglob
dotglob         on
#  ls --all
 -out.test9   ..           .test2-out.out      '\-out - Copy.test9'   test3-out       test5-out.txt.out   test7.txt
 .            .test1-out   .test5-out.txt.out  '\-out.test9'          test4-out.out   test6               test8-out.
#  for i in !(*-out.?*); do echo $i; done
.test1-out
\-out - Copy.test9
test3-out
test6
test7.txt
test8-out.

(Note the funky filename with a \ - right now I am at work using WSL, so it shows up in windows with one of those "missing" box characters (doesn't show up if I paste it in here though)[/code]

[disciple]

Just as a quick skim it seems like the original question was answered. That said you can use regular expressions in bash without using external tools like AWK. For instance see this stack overflow thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/187 ... t/18710850

However, one thing I"m not sure about is which regular expression syntax this supports. For instance does it support full PERL compatible regular expression or alternatively an older form of regular expressions.

Thanks, that's a very useful thing to point out, although I tend to find regular expressions a lot more difficult to follow than globbing.