Possibly a silly question.....

Khannie

Is there a way to say "all files in the current directory, including hidden files, except . and .."?

When I want to specify that, I usually use backticks like this: `ls -A` (e.g. cp `ls -A` <destination>) but it just seems clunky (edit: and also fails miserably when there are spaces). I feel like there's a better way to do it that I'm missing out on.

edit: It's possible to do it with a for loop also to overcome the spaces issue. I just feel like that's clunky too.

djmarkus

find . -maxdepth 1

Khannie

That's slightly worse than ls -A in that it includes "."

You could use: find . -maxdepth 1 | grep -v -e "\.$"

but that just gives the same as ls -A (effectively) and doesn't overcome the spaces issue.

Rambo

Khannie wrote: »

Is there a way to say "all files in the current directory, including hidden files, except . and .."?

When I want to specify that, I usually use backticks like this: `ls -A` (e.g. cp `ls -A` <destination>) but it just seems clunky (edit: and also fails miserably when there are spaces). I feel like there's a better way to do it that I'm missing out on.

edit: It's possible to do it with a for loop also to overcome the spaces issue. I just feel like that's clunky too.

English please
try dir command

djmarkus

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec mv '{}' '{}'.bak \;


is that kind of what your trying to do? this appends ".bak" to all the files in the current directory and doesnt include .





Rambo: what are you talking about? we're not using DOS here.

Creamy Goodness

Rambo wrote: »

English please
try dir command

lol i know i add nothing to the post, but that has to be the funniest thing i read all day.

FruitLover

rambo wrote: »

english Please
Try Dir Command

Potm

Khannie

fruitlover wrote: »

potm

ROFL.







a

Khannie

djmarkus wrote: »

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec mv '{}' '{}'.bak \;


is that kind of what your trying to do? this appends ".bak" to all the files in the current directory and doesnt include .

That's possibly it alright. I'd just substitute the .bak bit for a destination directory. It's just a long oul' command for something that I feel (only in my gut) should be relatively trivial.

Rambo

djmarkus wrote: »

Rambo: what are you talking about? we're not using DOS here.

I could not understand is first post because it should have said

Is there a way to save "all files in the current directory, including hidden files, except . and .."?

I thought is wanted some from directory listing without .. which the dir command does under linux

when I save files I use the tar command of the directory
example
at root /: tar -cf home/myfolder myhome.tar

very fast and quick

FruitLover

Rambo wrote: »

I thought is wanted some from directory listing without .. which the dir command does under linux

And also precisely what 'ls-A' does, as the OP has already discovered, c.f. first post.

Khannie

Rambo wrote: »

I could not understand is first post because it should have said

In fairness....it should have said exactly what it said. I'm interested in finding an alternate way of specifying everything in the current directory except "." and ".." because I absolutely shafted myself one day by doing:

chown -R <user>:<group> .* *

and this included "." and ".." but it's come up again recently when I wanted to copy the contents of the directory including hidden files (and files with spaces) and couldn't think of a straightforward way to do it so I figured I was missing out on something.

leeroybrown

Check if ls on the machine you're using accepts the -Q (quoted output) option. If it does that will get you around the whitespace issue:

ls -AQ

Piping it through xargs to do the work would also be a good idea:

ls -AQ | xargs chown -Rh user:group

Finally, note that I've passed a -h to chown. Otherwise the chown will follow symlinks and leave them owned by the old user:group.

djmarkus

This is really a round about way when you can use find -exec.

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec chown -Rh dmarkey:users '{}' \;

leeroybrown

djmarkus wrote: »

This is really a round about way when you can use find -exec.

Despite my above suggestion for Khannie I agree. I always use find for this kind of stuff as it guarantees that there won't be any filename issues that cause something unpredictable and it tends to be efficient. Nothing beats find when you're dealing with 1TB+ and 1m+ files.

Khannie

Thanks lads.