Re: Bash Pattern Matching Syntax

From: Will Maier (willmaier_at_ml1.net)
Date: 10/16/05

  • Next message: Brian A. Seklecki: "ng_one2many v.s. AFT (NIC Fault Tolerance/Fail Over/Redundancy Revisited)" 
    Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:07:06 -0500
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org

    On Sat, Oct 15, 2005 at 03:37:11PM -0700, Drew Tomlinson wrote:
    > I want to list the files in a directory that end in ".jpg"
    > irregardless of case. Thus after reading the bash man page, it
    > seems I should be able to issue a command something along the
    > lines of "ls [*.[JjPpGg]]" or "ls *.[JjPpGg]" but neither of
    > these work and return a "No such file or directory" message. I've
    > also tried various ways of escaping the '*' and '." but that
    > didn't help either. However "ls *[JjPpGg]" does work by listing
    > the files. However I want to match the "." before "jpg" as well.
    > What is the correct syntax for what I'm trying to do?

    The square brackets define a range of characters; [a-z] includes all
    lowercase alphabetic characters between 'a' and 'z' and will match
    _only one character from that range_ in a given string.
        
        [a-z] matches 'b'
        [a-z] matches 'z'
        [a-z] doesn't match 'all'
        [a-z] doesn't match '1'

    Your first attempt, [*.[JjPpGg]], has an extra pair of brackets.
    Secondly, it (like your second attempt) defines a range that would
    match only one character, JjPpGg:
        
        [JjPpGg] matches 'j'
        [JjPpGg] matches 'G'
        [JjPpGg] doesn't match 'JPG'
        [JjPpGg] doesn't match 'jpg'

    You need to break your patterns up; what you're looking for is a
    pattern of three characters, with 'J' or 'j' in the first position,
    'P' or 'p' in the second, and 'G' or 'g' in the third. That entire
    pattern should be prepended by a string of any characters (*) and a
    period (.).

    Here are some examples to demonstrate what I've written above; they
    conclude with a pattern that will match the files you're looking
    for.

        sh-3.00$ ls
        a all test.JPG test.jpg
        sh-3.00$ ls [a-z]
        a
        sh-3.00$ ls [all]
        a
        sh-3.00$ ls *.[JjPpGg]
        ls: *.[JjPpGg]: No such file or directory
        sh-3.00$ ls *.[Jj][Pp][Gg]
        test.JPG test.jpg 

    -- 
o--------------------------{ Will Maier }--------------------------o
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