Wildcards: how do I list files ending in `.txt` only without using the dot character?

Question

I have a directory with nine files in it.

• 1 ending in .bat
• 2 ending in .bak
• 4 ending in .txt
• 2 ending in .xtxt

My question is, how do i list only the files ending in .txt, but without using the period. So I want to display the 4 ending in .txt, without using the command

ls *.txt

because I don't want to use the period to filter out the files. I'm learning wildcards at the moment so they are used in this. I think I have to use the ! command somehow but I'm unsure where to use it.

Solution 1

If you are using the Bash shell:

shopt -s extglob
ls !(*xtxt|*bak|*bat)

Solution 2

I don't understand why you don't want to use .. Anyway you can use some character class instead where . is included, but other chars from your directory not, good candidate for this purpose can be [[:punct:]]:

LC_ALL=C ls -- *[[:punct:]]txt

I changed locale to C as character classes depend on that, and added -- to ls option in order to list all files which start with - properly.

---

_Definition:

`[:punct:]'
     Punctuation characters; in the `C' locale and ASCII character
     encoding, this is `! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \
     ] ^ _ ` { | } ~'.

Solution 3

Use [!x]txt to list all files ending in txt but exclude the ones ending in xtxt:

ls ./*[!x]txt

(you may have to turn off history expansion in your shell if you get an event not found)
or use ASCII code for dot, e.g.:

ls ./*$'\x2E'txt

or

ls ./*$'\056'txt

Solution 4

Extremely ugly, since this could be achieved using find . -type f -name "*.txt" easily, but if you don't want to put an . in there, and the only file extensions you are going to find in that directory are .bat, .bak, .txt, and .xtxt, then you can try this:

ls *txt | grep -v "xtxt$"

ls *txt will bring anything ending with txt, and grep -v "xtxt$" will prevent to show in the results anything that ends in xtxt.

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Comments

[pabouk - Ukraine stay strong]

The part LC_ALL=C does not have the intended effect because it affects only the process ls but the path expansion is performed by the shell where the original value of LC_ALL stays unchanged. --- The easiest way of doing what you intended is to start a subshell and set the variable in its scope using a separate assignment command (notice the semicolon): ( LC_ALL=C ; ls -- *[[:punct:]]txt ) The subshell ensures that the original state of LC_ALL does not change.