Shell Programming and Scripting

I am on hp-ux and not able to catch the file with dot using a wild card.

Code:

$ touch .test

Code:

$ ls -l .test
-rw-r--r--   1 oracle     dba              0 Mar 21 05:20 .test

Code:

$ ls -l *test
*test not found

Code:

$ ls -la *test
*test not found

Why i am not able to list the file startign with . (dot) with an wild character *

Moderator's Comments:

How to use code tags

Code:

ls -la .*test

Just for completeness, files with names starting with a period character are known as "hidden files".

Hi everyone,

I'm by no means an expert on the topic, however it has occured to me that

Code:

ls -la .*test

will not work

because the bash interpreter will decode this as "look for all files that have an extention whose patters is : <any combination >test.

what I'm trying to say is the dot (.) is interpreted here as the extension delimiter. It is not interpreted as "files that are hidden".


I tested ls -la .*test on gentoo linux and it definitely does not return the hidden file called "test".

In my own simplistic way, because I'm not a pro, I worked out the following solution (I'm certain there are better):

Code:

ls -la | grep 'test'

I realise it's listing EVERYTHING and only grabbing whatever has the pattern "test" in it, and this may or may not be what you want, however that's what I was able to summon with my limited knowledge and free time.

Please, I invite you to refine my search.

@alfonsopilato. Hi, there is not such thing as an extension on Unix. So humans may call it that way, but for the system it is a file with a dot somewhere in the name (a dot at the beginning does have a special meaning of course as it designates a hidden file etc).

Code:

$ touch .test
$ ls -l .*test
-rw-r--r--  1 me       staff  0 Apr 14 22:53 .test

@Scrutinizer, thank you. I have tried ls -l .*test and that works for me now.

Was it the "touch .test " that may have kicked it in?
I have reviewd my command history and reran the command that previously had failed.. it's now working.

Thanks again for clarifying this. I do very much appreciate it.

I'm glad I stated I'm not a pro; truly I'm not.

I'll remember "touch" from now on. :-)

Hi alfonsopilato, welcome to the Unix and Linux forums!
The touch had nothing to do with it, that is just a way to create zero length file if it does not already exist.