On Sat, 2011-05-28 at 20:29 -0700, suvayu ali wrote: > Hi Patrick, > > On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 8:22 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan > <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > > >> > $ ls \.[^.]* > >> > > >> > >> Thanks a lot Patrick, I had no idea ls accepted regular expressions! > > > > It doesn't. You need to read up on how the Shell works. > > I was under the impression the shell accepts simple globs like '?' for > any single character and '*' for any one or more characters hence I > assumed it is an ls feature. I just read the "pattern matching" > section in 'man bash' and realised I was misinformed. :) The use of regular expressions for filename matching dates back to the beginnings of Unix. In fact on 16-bit machines it was actually done in a separate program called /etc/glob, called by the Shell when needed, since otherwise the Shell process would have been too big for the address space (64Kb :-). Those days have long gone of course. BTW this is where we get the verb "globbing" meaning "filename expansion". poc -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
