Home/ Questions/Q 8106725
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-06T00:33:08+00:00

I have three file in a directory: a.html : <html> a </html> b.html :

  • 0

I have three file in a directory:

a.html:

<html>
    a    
</html>

b.html:

<html>
    b
</html>

htmlfile:

this is just a html file

I want to get the files which filename extension are not .html, so the command I use is:

ls|grep -v *html

but the result is:

<html>
    b
</html>

why?

Thank you. but I don’t know why ls|grep -v *html print out the content of b.html. if this command is print out the content of files which ending with .html, why don’t print out the content of a.html?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since you did not put *html in quotes, the shell expands your command to

    ls | grep -v a.html b.html

    Now, since grep is called with two arguments, it will ignore stdin. So the result is equivalent to

    grep -v "a.html" b.html

    which prints the contents of b.html.

    edit

    To make it work, use either

    ls | grep -v "html$"
# Note that html$ is the regexp equivalent to the shell pattern *html

    or

    shopt -s extglob # turn on extended globbing
ls -d !(*html)
    • 0