Question

How is it possible to delete files containing a string as an embedded string except at the
beginning or end by using wild-cards.

I’m an amateur started Ubuntu less than a month.

Answer 1

I don’t think this is possible with a single expansion pattern. You can use grep for filtering instead:

ls -d '*foo*' | egrep -v '^foo|foo$' | xargs rm

So the ls lists everything containing foo, then egrep removes the files with matches at the beginning/end, and finally xargs runs a command (rm in this case) on each remainder.

The dangerous thing about this technique is that filenames may contain special characters like line breaks or asterisks, so use at your own risk!