List files with certain extensions with ls and grep

Question

I just want to get the files from the current dir and only output .mp4 .mp3 .exe files nothing else. So I thought I could just do this:

ls | grep \\.mp4$ | g         


        

Answer 1

Use regular expressions with find:

find . -iregex '.*\.\(mp3\|mp4\|exe\)' -printf '%f\n'

If you're piping the filenames:

find . -iregex '.*\.\(mp3\|mp4\|exe\)' -printf '%f\0' | xargs -0 dosomething

This protects filenames that contain spaces or newlines.

OS X find only supports alternation when the -E (enhanced) option is used.

find -E . -regex '.*\.(mp3|mp4|exe)'