How do I find all files that do not begin with a given prefix in bash?

Question

I have a bunch of files in a folder:

foo_1 
foo_2
foo_3
bar_1
bar_2
buzz_1
...

I want to find all the files that do not st

Answer 1

Using bash and wildcards: ls [!bar_]*. There is a caveat: the order of the letters is not important, so rab_something.txt will not be listed.

Answer 2

This should do the trick in any shell

ls | grep -v '^prefix'

The -v option inverts grep's search logic, making it filter out all matches. Using grep instead of find you can use powerful regular expressions instead of the limited glob patterns.

Answer 3

With extended globs:

shopt -s extglob
ls !(bar_*) > filelist.txt

The !(pattern) matches anything but pattern, so !(bar_*) is any filename that does not start with bar_.

Answer 4

If you're doing subdirectories as well:

find . ! -name "bar_*"

Or, equivalently,

find . -not -name "*bar_*"

Answer 5

You want to find filenames not starting with bar_*?

recursive:

find ! -name 'bar_*' > Negatives.txt

top directory:

find -maxdepth 1 ! -name 'bar_*' > Negatives.txt

Answer 6

In my case I had an extra requirement, the files must end with the .py extension. So I use:

find . -name "*.py" | grep -v prefix_

In your case, to just exclude files with prefix_:

find . | grep -v prefix_

Note that this includes all sub-directories. There are many ways to do this, but it can be easy to remember for those already familiar with find and grep -v which excludes results.