Question

I have this script:

#!/bin/sh
du -s */ [^.]*/ | sort -n | while read a; do echo $a; done | sed -r 's/^ *([ 0-9]{3})([ 0-9]{3})([ 0-9]{3}) *(.*)\/$/\1 \2 \3 \4/'

but for some reason I get this error:

du: cannot access `[^.]*/': No such file or directory

What am I missing? I don’t know what’s wrong with my script.

Thanks

Answer 1

Bash doesn’t support regexp as file name patterns by default, only glob.

Usually, directories that start with . are not included in */. If you want to include the save ones, use .??*/ (excludes . and ..). It’s not perfect (misses .X/) but is good enough most of the time.

[EDIT] You can enable a subset of regexp with shopt -s extglob (kudos to fered for pointing that out).

See Bash Extended Globbing for details.