Question

I want to list all the executable files in the cwd using grep, and I used the following:

ls -F -a | grep "[*]$"

And it works, but why doesn’t the following command work? It should be equivalent:

ls -F -a | grep -E "[*]\>"

Oddly enough, if I use a standard character as ending letter (like grep -E “[a]>”) it works just fine

Answer 1

ls -F | grep -E "[*]\>"

This won’t do what you are expecting because * is not a “word” character and looking for an end-of-word boundary immediately after it makes no sense.

ls -F -a | grep "[*]$"

Will yield all lines ending with * as specified. This makes sense.

You should heed @Adam’s advice: You should not parse the output of ls.