How do I find all files that do not begin with a given prefix in bash?

Question

I have a bunch of files in a folder:

foo_1 
foo_2
foo_3
bar_1
bar_2
buzz_1
...

I want to find all the files that do not start with a given prefix and save the list to a text file. Here is an example for the files that do have a given prefix:

find bar_* > Positives.txt

Solution 1

This should do the trick in any shell

ls | grep -v '^prefix'

The -v option inverts grep's search logic, making it filter out all matches. Using grep instead of find you can use powerful regular expressions instead of the limited glob patterns.

Solution 2

If you're doing subdirectories as well:

find . ! -name "bar_*"

Or, equivalently,

find . -not -name "*bar_*"

Solution 3

You want to find filenames not starting with bar_*?

recursive:

find ! -name 'bar_*' > Negatives.txt

top directory:

find -maxdepth 1 ! -name 'bar_*' > Negatives.txt