Question

How to delete all files in the current dir – but not those which have 1.65 in the title?

I tried to capture such files with

*[^1][^\.][^6][^5]*
*[^\(1\.65\)]*

(one can press Alt-* to expand the regexp)

but it doesn’t work. Here’s a code for experiments:

touch foo1.65bar \#bla1.66 qbit0.65t 1.65boris notRelated@All 

Answer 1

It is often more reliable and expressive to use find for such jobs:

find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 '(' -type f -and -not -name '*1\.65*' ')' -delete