I want to be able to loop through a list of files that match a particular pattern. I can get unix to list these files using ls and egrep with a regular expression, but I cannot find a way to turn this into an iterative process. I suspect that using ls is not the answer. Any help would be gratefully received.
My current ls command looks as follows:
ls | egrep -i 'MYFILE[0-9][0-9]([0][1-9]|1[0-2])([0][1-9]|[12][0-9]|[3][01]).dat'
I would expect the above to match:
but not:
Thanks,
Paul.
You can use (GNU) find with the regex search option instead of parsing ls.
find . -regextype "egrep" \
-iregex '.*/MYFILE[0-9][0-9]([0][1-9]|1[0-2])([0][1-9]|[12][0-9]|[3][01]).dat' \
-exec [[whatever you want to do]] {} \;
Where [[whatever you want to do]] is the command you want to perform on the names of the files.
From the man page
-regextype type Changes the regular expression syntax understood by -regex and -iregex tests which occur later on the command line. Currently-implemented types are emacs (this is the default),posix-awk, posix-basic, posix-egrep and posix-extended. -regex pattern File name matches regular expression pattern. This is a match on the whole path, not a search. For example, to match a file named `./fubar3', you can use the regular expression `.*bar.' or `.*b.*3', but not `f.*r3'. The regular expressions understood by find are by default Emacs Regular Expressions, but this can be changed with the -regextype option. -iregex pattern Like -regex, but the match is case insensitive.