bash . moving files except files with a given suffix

Question

Is there any way in bash to glob files that does not end with a certain suffix ?

e.g. I'm doing this:

mv $INCDIR/HDR_10_* $BACKUPDIR

But I don't want to move the HDR_10_* that ends with .gz

Answer 1

This would work for the file move:

mv $( echo $INCDIR/HDR_10_* | grep -v '\.gz$') $BACKUPDIR

You also asked 'to glob files that does not end with a certain suffix ?' Bash has the shell option (shopt) extglob, which allows extended globbing syntax. The !(...glob...) matches everything but the glob pattern.

shopt -s extglob
cd $INCDIR
mv !(*.gz) $BACKUPDIR

would work only if $INCDIR contained only files named HDR_10_*, specifically it would match any file or directory in $INCDIR that doesn't match *.gz. Technically you're asking for a glob that both matches one pattern but not another, which i don't think exists as a simple single entity.

Answer 2

Under ksh, !(*.gz) matches all files in the current directory except the files that match *.gz. The same pattern works in bash after shopt -s extglob, and in zsh after setopt ksh_glob. Neither ksh nor bash has a way to take the intersection of a positive match and a negative match. In zsh, after setopt extended_glob , you can write $INCDIR/HDR_10_*~$INCDIR/*.gz.

One solution, in any Bourne-style shell (ash, bash, ksh, zsh, ...), is to iterate over the files and check each match.

for x in "$INCDIR"/HDR_10_*; do
  case "$x" in
    *.gz) :;;
    *) mv -- "$x" "$BACKUPDIR";;
  esac
done

Another solution is to use find. The following command will move files in subdirectories as well.

find "$INCDIR" -type f -name 'HDR_10_*' \! -name '*.gz' -exec mv {} "$BACKUPDIR" \;

If you have GNU find (e.g. under Linux), You can add -maxdepth 1 after "$INCDIR" to move files only directly in $INCDIR.

Note that You should always use double quotes around variable substitutions (e.g. "$INCDIR", not $INCDIR) unless you have a good reason to omit them. Otherwise you will run into trouble if you have files whose name contains special characters such as whitespace or \[?*.

Answer 3

If you use find, grep, and xargs, you can do this fairly easily.

I am sure there are better constructions, but this is one that comes to mind right away:

# find <here>| <pattern>    | <notpattern>| <what to do>
find $INCDIR | grep HDR_10_ | grep -v .gz | xargs mv $BACKUPDIR

A correction was pointed-out in the comments that the above quick-stab won't work because of mv not getting its arguments in the proper order from xargs:

find $INCDIR -name 'HDR_10_*' ! -name '*.gz' -exec mv {} $BACKUPDIR \