how do I correctly negate zsh globbing expressions?

Question

I want to list all files but those ending with owp: Hence I tried:

  ls -l *.(^owp)
  zsh: unknown sort specifier
  ls -l *(^owp) 
  zsh: unknown sort specifier
  ls -l *[^o][^w][^p] # does not work either, missing some files

none worked. How do I that in a correct manner? My .zshrc has "set extendedglob".

score 40 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 22 '17 at 10:45

40

Try either:

ls -l ^*.owp

(i.e. match anything except the pattern *.owp)

or:

ls -l *~*.owp

(i.e. match anything that matches the pattern * but does not match *.owp)

See man zshexpn => FILENAME GENERATION => Glob Operators for more on this.

Appended () in glob patterns are for glob qualifiers, whereas you want a glob operator.

What *.(^owp) does is:

Match all file names ending with a dot
if they aren't pipes (^p), and
sort the matches (o) by "w" => "unknown sort specifier"

See man zshexpn => FILENAME GENERATION => Glob Qualifiers for more on this.

edited Mar 22 '17 at 10:45

Sparhawk

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answered Mar 22 '12 at 14:09

peth

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^*.owp did the job. whooa, for what *.(^owp) really does :) – math Mar 22 '12 at 14:19
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For anyone who can't get this to work, you need to set the `extendedglob` option in Zsh. – DBedrenko May 31 '14 at 13:54
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@DBedrenko: thanks! N.B.: done via `setopt extendedglob` – Thomas M Jun 12 '17 at 07:16
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I found [this](https://www.refining-linux.org/archives/37-ZSH-Gem-2-Extended-globbing-and-expansion.html) useful as a quick summary for anyone interested in glob qualifiers. – wardw Jan 19 '19 at 09:55

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 09 '21 at 15:05

-1

I was having this same issue trying to pull a branch down from git.

Example:feature/this_feature(error_1)

I had to escape the parenthesis: feature/this_feature\(error_1\)

answered Aug 09 '21 at 15:05

BlaineOmega

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how do I correctly negate zsh globbing expressions?

2 Answers2