Exclude a string from wildcard search in a shell

Question

I am trying to exclude a certain string from a file search.

Suppose I have a list of files: file_Michael.txt, file_Thomas.txt, file_Anne.txt.

I want to be ab

Answer 1

With Bash

shopt -s extglob
ls !(*Thomas).txt

where the first line means "set extended globbing", see the manual for more information.

Some other ways could be:

find . -type f \( -iname "*.txt" -a -not -iname "*thomas*" \)

ls *txt |grep -vi "thomas"