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Questions tagged [wildcards]

Wildcard patterns or glob patterns are patterns to select a collection of file names or other strings.

56 questions
40
votes
4 answers

How should I glob for all hidden files except . and ..?

I want to carry out some action (say chown) on all the hidden files in a directory. I know that this .* is not a good idea because it will also find the current . and parent .. directories (I know that rm will fail to operate on . and .. but other…
Zanna
  • 72,312
24
votes
2 answers

Regular expressions VS Filename globbing

I know that Regular expressions are to be used only with characters and strings, but sometimes I find them in the names of files. My question is: are regexes only used with characters or also with filenames?
Hamza
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21
votes
2 answers

Can anyone explain why sudo ls with a wildcard doesn't work?

$ sudo -iu abc ls -ltr /sites/servers/server_instance/logs/access* ls: cannot access /sites/servers/server_instance/logs/access*: No such file or directory $ sudo -iu abc ls -ltr /sites/servers/server_instance/logs/ total 594812 -rwxrwxrwx 1 abc…
Faisal
  • 321
17
votes
4 answers

Citrix receiver 13.10 on Ubuntu 18.04.1

I am trying to get Citrix receiver to work on my Ubuntu laptop. I've installed the Citrix receiver, however when I try to open the .ica file that my company provides when I login to my organisation's Citrix StoreFront site by Chrome, it exits out…
Reza
  • 331
14
votes
4 answers

How to pass '*' wildcard to path parameter of find command via a variable in script?

I want to use find to find files in a set of folders restricted by wildcards, but where there are spaces in the path name. From the command line, this is easy. The following examples all work. find te*/my\ files/more -print find te*/'my…
Paddy Landau
  • 4,658
13
votes
1 answer

Is globbing a feature of the shell?

I read many questions and answers like this and this one I know wildcards are expanded by the shell before running a command and they are a feature of the shell. Also wildcards work with those commands that can accept many arguments. In find .…
Sinoosh
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11
votes
4 answers

7zip: How to exclude file types?

I want to exclude the following file types: epub pdf html (upper case too) azw3 mobi opf txt I have this so far which doesn't seem to work, i get an error saying "Incorrect Command Line". 7z e "-x!*.epub" "-x!*.pdf" "-x!*.html" "-x!*.azw3"…
olfek
  • 1,353
11
votes
2 answers

Is there a way to disable asterisk * interpolation for certain bash commands?

I'd like to be able to write * to my script, and to get * as-is (i.e., without expansion). Bash will try to replace it with local files matching this pattern, and if this pattern doesn't exist, bash will pass the asterisk without modifications. I…
Berry Tsakala
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2 answers

What is the wildcard specifying one or two characters?

Is there a simpler way to write: wc -l foo?.txt foo??.txt ? Since in my case I have (at most) two digit numbers, I tried using the range specification wc -l foo[1-99].txt but this ended up displaying only results between 1 and 9 (instead of 99). But…
Matsmath
  • 380
7
votes
1 answer

How to delete this files with wildcards in ubuntu terminal

Just asking how to delete these files (below is a sample). I tried rm -rf '*.upload'. but they are not deleted. Please help. thanks for…
jonathan
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7
votes
1 answer

Is there a way to use wild cards, redirection or other shell syntax with systemd units?

I have a systemd file to start a jar file. But I want to execute jar file as *.jar. Is there a way to do this? [Unit] Description=Test Background [Service] ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -jar…
Janith
  • 399
5
votes
1 answer

How to show a difference between the usage of '*' , '+' and '?' in grep?

I understand that '*' : The preceding item will be matched zero or more times. '?' : The preceding item is optional and will be matched, at most, once. '+' : The preceding item will be matched one or more items Can anyone give me an example of when…
posixKing
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5
votes
1 answer

Why doesn't the wildcard "?" work?

I'm learning to use the terminal on Ubuntu with WSL. Right now I'm practicing wildcards, but the ? wildcard doesn't work for me. As you can see, the * wildcard works but this one doesn't: $ ls file* file.html file.js file.txt $ ls dot* dot.txt…
Daniel Sierra
  • 61
4
votes
2 answers

Asterisk not working with grep

I searched for ki with * as per the example below and it should have returned the first three lines. I am not sure why it returns the last line when there is no ki matching it. $ grep "ki*"…
Aakanksha Chaturvedi
  • 41
4
votes
1 answer

How does a command (i.e. grep) know when it is run as part of glob expansion?

As per my understanding, a glob wildcard is interpreted by the shell, which then runs the given command for each matching filename. Suppose I have files: abc1, abc2, and abc3 in my current directory. Then, for example, echo abc* will echo once for…
codecitrus
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