UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Anyone know the proper command to copy files whose names CONTAIN a capital letter to a diff location? Every time I do it I ke copying ALL the files. Here is what ive tried

Code:

cp *[A-Z]* newlocation
 
cp [A-Z] newlocation

Shell globbing doesn't work like that, * means "match anything" not "match multiples of the previous char". So I don't think shell globbing can do it.

I think you could do it with grep by matching anything that's NOT what you want and reversing it with -v. So:

Code:

ls | grep -v "[^A-Z]" | while read FILE ; do [ ! -d "$FILE" ] && cp "$FILE" /new/location/

Seems rather legthy just to copy files from one directory to another though. I swear Ive seen this done before. I will keep scouring the web and post a reply when I finally find it. Itd be nice to know so if you signify file names with a capital letter in them because they are part of a structure you are constantly moving or backing up youd be able to do so easilly.

Oh, just ONE capital letter?

Code:

cp *[A-Z]* newlocation

should work fine. If it doesn't, please post what it actually did, including error output even if it didn't actually succeed in copying anything.

Ive tried that and I thought that would be it but it also copies files without capital letters. Im looking to copy any file that contains any amount of capital letters. So if I had files named

Zebra
uPPer
down
side
horsE

I would copy Zebra, uPPer and horsE

Corona688's cp command should work.

Another one:

Code:

ls *[A-Z]* |xargs -i cp {} newlocation