Exclude a string from wildcard search in a shell

Question

Hello everybody

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 able and write something like

ls *<and not Thomas>.txt

to give me file_Michael.txt and file_Anne.txt, but not file_Thomas.txt.

The reverse is easy:

ls *Thomas.txt

Doing it with a single character is also easy:

ls *[^s].txt

But how to do it with a string?

Sebastian

Answer 1

with bash

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

some other ways

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

ls *txt |grep -vi "thomas"

Answer 2

You can use find to do this:

$ find . -name '*.txt' -a ! -name '*Thomas.txt'