shell commands - exclusion

Jaime jaime at snowmoon.com
Wed Feb 4 19:05:32 PST 2009


On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 9:35 AM, t-u-t <marshc187 at gmail.com> wrote:
> if i have say one (or even two) single file/directories among many others,
> and i want to perform any said function like cp, mv, rm, etc.. , to all
> other files except that one or two, is there a way to do that in a single
> command?
> e.g
> rm -r * {-except foo1 foo15}

I'm just shooting in the dark here, but what about this?

ls | grep -v foo1 | grep -v foo15 | xargs rm -rf

Remember the Unix "pipe" and the grep and xargs commands.  It can
solve a lot of things by stringing together a lot of smaller commands.
 I think that this might be one of those situations.

Good luck,
Jaime


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