Shell Programming and Scripting

hi
i have 4 dir called
old-dir1
old-dir2
dir3
dir4
now i need to grep only old dir named

Code:

ls -d  old* > outfile

The output will show as:

Code:

cat  outfile
old-dir1 old-dir2

Desired output is:

Code:

old-dir1
old-dir2

I must be missing something here:-
ls -ld old* ..... will never give anything like what your cat gives...
Also any file or directory beginning with 'old' will be LONG listed.
How are you filtering the directories to be displayed ONLY...

hi wisecracker,

sorry my bad, i have updated it now
it is ls -d to show only directories

As we have no idea of your current drawer format we have to assume there are files beginning with 'old' too.
ls -d does NOT do what you think it does, read man ls for more info...
but here is my printout of manually doing what you need INCLUDING a file with a beginning section...

Code:

Last login: Sat Sep 26 12:39:07 on ttys000
AMIGA:barrywalker~> ls -ld Des* > /tmp/text
AMIGA:barrywalker~> cat /tmp/text
-rwxr-xr-x   1 barrywalker  staff  154912 26 Sep 12:29 Desk_top.txt
drwx------+ 13 barrywalker  staff     442  8 Sep 20:35 Desktop
AMIGA:barrywalker~> ls -d Des* > /tmp/text
AMIGA:barrywalker~> cat /tmp/text
Desk_top.txt
Desktop
AMIGA:barrywalker~> _

Inside OSX 10.7.5, default bash terminal.
As you can see apart from having a text file with it it is formatting correctly.
And once again how are you filtering the files from the directiores beginning with the same name?

When ls output is directed to a terminal device, it can default to multi-column output. But, when output is directed to a regular file or a pipe, the output should be as you wanted with single-column output.

What operating system are you using?

Is an alias in play? (What output do you get from the command: type ls?)

Try:
ls -1d old* > outfile
Note that the added option is the digit one (not the lowercase letter ell).

If you just want to see directories in a case like this, you can use:

Code:

ls -d Des*/ > /tmp/text

The output will include a trailing slash, but in many cases that won't matter. If the trailing slash is a problem, there are lots of ways to get rid of it depending on how the output is being processed.