Question 37484 in Ubuntu Question posted in
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Bash – For loop , exclude files with specific pattern in filename right before filetype – Ubuntu

I am trying to run a for loop but trying to exclude files with a specific pattern in the filename. This is the command I am using:

for file in /home/ubuntu/discovery/download/*![.en].mp4; do

I would like this filename to be included:

Blub - S03E10 - Nervous Breakdown.mp4

but this filename to be excluded

Blub - S03E10 - Nervous Breakdown.en.mp4

Can’t get it to work. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance

Tags:

4

Answers


  1. 0

    What am I doing wrong?

    Standard globbing has no grouping or group negation operators (though the extended version has these). In your particular context, I would just filter out the unwanted files inside the loop:

    for file in /home/ubuntu/discovery/download/*.mp4; do
  case $file in
    *.en.mp4) continue;;
  esac

  # ...
done

    And that should work in any Bourne-family shell, not just Bash.

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  2. 0

    Pathname Expansion: "match not", with extglob enabled:

             !(pattern-list)
                Matches anything except one of the given patterns

    Try this:

    for file in /home/ubuntu/discovery/download/!(*.en).mp4; do
    ...
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  3. 0

    Another approach is to iterate over all files, skipping any that have undesirable name patterns. Just make sure to also handle the case where no files are found, because in that case, file is set equal to the glob pattern. Often you can handle that situation by verifying that the path in file actually exists (-e "${file}").

    for file in /home/ubuntu/discovery/download/*.mp4; do
    [[ -e "${file}" && "${file}" != *.en.mp4 ]] || continue
    echo ${file}
done
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  4. 0

    Another alternative could be:

    shopt -s nullglob
for file in /home/ubuntu/discovery/download/*{[^n],[^e]n,[^.]en}.mp4
do
# ...
done
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