List all files not starting with a number
Solution 1
All files and directories in /proc
which do not contain numbers (in other words, excluding process directories):
ls -d /proc/[^0-9]*
All files recursively under /proc
which do not start with a number:
find /proc -regex '.*/[0-9].*' -prune -o -print
But this will also exclude numeric files in subdirectories (for example /proc/foo/bar/123
). If you want to exclude only the top-level files with a number:
find /proc -regex '/proc/[0-9].*' -prune -o -print
Hold on again! Doesn't this mean that any regular files created by touch /proc/123
or the like will be excluded? Theoretically yes, but I don't think you can do that. Try creating a file for a PID which does not exist:
$ sudo touch /proc/123
touch: cannot touch `/proc/123': No such file or directory
Solution 2
You don't need grep, just ls
:
ls -ad /proc/[^0-9]*
if you want to search the whole subdirectory structure use find:
find /proc/ -type f -regex "[^0-9]*" -print
Solution 3
Use grep with -v
which tells it to print all lines not matching the pattern.
ls /proc | grep -v '[0-9+]'
Solution 4
ls /proc | grep -v -E '[0-9]+'
Comments
-
Pavan Manjunath almost 2 years
I want to examine the all the key files present in my
/proc
. But/proc
has innumerable directories corresponding to the running processes. I don't want these directories to be listed. All these directories' names contain only numbers. As I am poor in regular expressions, can anyone tell me whats theregex
that I need to send tols
to make it NOT to search files/directories which have numbers in their name?UPDATE: Thanks to all the replies! But I would love to have a
ls
alone solution instead ofls+grep
solution. Thels
alone solutions offered till now doesn't seem to be working!