Matching a sequence of symbols in bash

Question

I would like to list all Fortran 90 files in bash without files ending in _tst.f90. My best try so far is

ls -l ../src/*[!_tst].f90

According to Bash reference on pattern matching [!_tst] takes into account only single occurences of _, t and s. Is it possible to tell bash that _tst should be a sequence? Brackets (_tst), single '_tst' and double quote "_tst" symbols do not work.

Answer 1

Strictly answering your question: yes you can, but it doesn't work.

shopt -s extglob
ls -l ../src/*!(_tst).f90

The problem is that !(...) will happily match an empty string, so any filename foo_tst.f90 will just have the * swallow up the first seven characters.

I don't know a bash-native way to do this without using find(1).

In zsh:

setopt extended_glob
ls -ld ../src/*.f90~*_tst.f90

This uses the ~ extended_glob feature, where A~B results in anything matching A that does not match B.

Answer 2

If you want to find all files ending in f90, except those ending in _tst.f90, you should use the command:

find /spath/to/start/directory -name '*.f90' ! -name '*_tst.f90' -print

Edit: This goes down the whole tree. If you want to limit yourself to the current directory,

find /spath/to/start/directory -name '*.f90' ! -name '*_tst.f90' -maxdepth 1 -print

Answer 3

This is an expansion on the shopt -s extglob path:

shopt -s extglob
ls -l ../src/!(!(*.f90)|*_tst.f90)

which tells Bash to match anything that does not match either of:

• not *.f90, i.e. anything but .f90 files or

• _tst.f90, i.e. your test files.

which match only the *.f90 files except *_tst.f90.

It quickly becomes convoluted, and find is in my mind a more extensible solution for complex file matching, but if you want Bash only, similar constructs are possible.