How to un-select files in shell wildcard patterns

[andrew clarke]

On Fri 2019-06-21 05:49:09 UTC+0200, Polytropon (freebsd at edvax.de) wrote:

> I'm interested in a convenient method to "un-select" files
> when using regular (sh) shell wildcards. It's quite easy to
> describe things like
> 
> 	*.tex
> 
> to perform an operation on all LaTeX source files, or
> 
> 	*a*
> 
> on all files whose name contains (at least) one "a". Patterns
> that are based on the inclusion of certain attributes are not
> a problem to deal with using the builtin pattern matching of
> the shell.
> 
> But what about the opposite? Let's say, perform an operation
> on all files _except_ the LaTeX source files, or all files
> whose name does _not_ contain an "a"?
> 
> Is there a good method to do this, except creating a kind
> of "custom regex wrapper script" that does the selection part,
> for further use with `subshell` or | xargs?

zsh can do glob exclusion once "extended globbing" is enabled:

$ setopt extendedglob

List all files except LaTeX source files:

$ ls ^*.tex

List all files except those with an 'a' character in the name:

$ ls ^*a*