I have a list of files with numeric file names (e.g. #.php, ##.php or ###.php) that I'd like to copy/move in one fell swoop.
Does anyone know of an ls or grep combo command to accomplish this objective?
I do have this much:
ls -al | grep "[0-9].php"
Amend it like this:
ls -al | grep -E '^[0-9]+\.php$'
-E activates the extended regular expressions.
+ requires that at least one occurrence of the preceding group must appear.
\. escape dot otherwise it means "any character."
^ and $ to match the entire filename and not only a part.
Single quotes to prevent variable expansion (it would complain because of the $).
You can use regular expression when listing files:
ls [0-9]*
This was an easy and minimalistic approach at the above problem but I think a better solution is
ls -al | grep -E '^[0-9]+\.php$'
as UncleZeiv explains below.
Use find:
$ find . -regex '^[0-9]+\.php' -exec mv '{}' dest/ ';'
Note that the -regex argument does a search, not a match, which is why the ^ is there to anchor it to the start. This also assumes that the files are in the same directory (.) as the one you're in when running the command.
The {} trickery in the mv command is replaced by find with the found filename.
Either use find (possibly combined with the -XXXdepth options):
find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -regex '^[0-9]+\.php' -exec mv '{}' dest/ ';'
Or use the builtin regex capabilities:
pattern='^[0-9]+\.php$'
for file in *.php
do
[[ $file =~ $pattern ]] && echo "$file"
done
Don't use ls or grep.
In Bash, you can use extended pattern matching:
shopt -s extglob
ls -l +([0-9]).php
which will find files such as:
123.php
9.php
but not
a.php
2b.php
c3.php