List files not matching a pattern?

Question

Here\'s how one might list all files matching a pattern in bash:

ls *.jar

How to list the complement of a pattern? i.e. all files not match

Answer 1

With an appropriate version of find, you could do something like this, but it's a little overkill:

find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name '*.jar'

find finds files. The . argument specifies you want to start searching from ., i.e. the current directory. -maxdepth 1 tells it you only want to search one level deep, i.e. the current directory. ! -name '*.jar' looks for all files that don't match the regex *.jar.

Like I said, it's a little overkill for this application, but if you remove the -maxdepth 1, you can then recursively search for all non-jar files or what have you easily.

Answer 2

Use egrep-style extended pattern matching.

ls !(*.jar)

This is available starting with bash-2.02-alpha1. Must first be enabled with

shopt -s extglob

As of bash-4.1-alpha there is a config option to enable this by default.

Answer 3

POSIX defines non-matching bracket expressions, so we can let the shell expand the file names for us.

ls *[!j][!a][!r]

This has some quirks though, but at least it is compatible with about any unix shell.