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I have a list of directories where most are in a format like ./[foobar]/. However, some are formatted like ./[foo] bar/.

I would like to use find (or some other utility my shell offers) to find those directories not matching the first pattern (i.e. having text outside the square braces). Until now, I was unable to find a way to "inverse" my pattern.

Any ways to do this?

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  • To clarify - you are looking for a regex that matches a string that has text between // characters that is not between [] characters? Would that mean any string that doesn't match /[.*]/ - with appropriate escaping of the / and [] characters, of course... ? As for "match something that is not"... see stackoverflow.com/questions/406230/… Commented Mar 6, 2013 at 17:14

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You could combine find with grep and it's -v option. find . -type d | grep -v "[foobar]"

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3 Comments

Probably the most simple solution.
This is incorrect. You need to switch to grep -Fv to switch to literal matching, or escape the regex special \[ because the current regular expression will match any string which contains either f or o or b or a or r anywhere.
this is not ideal because does not stop find from 'finding' the files that do not match. This is a major setback when you are deal with thousands+ files and directories that you want to exclude.
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A simple regular glob will work in this particular example:

$ ls [a]b [ab] $ echo \[*\] [ab]

For more complex patterns you can enable extglob:

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

(and similar globs)

Or using find:

find dir ! -name ...
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2 Comments

Works in general, but piping find to grep seems easier.
As long as you're not going to use it beyond simply looking, that will be fine, though I think the glob is easier (and safer if there are any spaces in file names).
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find supports negation by means of ! and -not. The latter is not POSIX-compliant. In order to use ! you have to precede it with backslash or put it inside single quotes.

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find -type d -name '*\]?*'

Unless you insist on opening bracket check...

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