Question

Say I want to copy the contents of a directory excluding files and folders whose names contain the word ‘Music’.

cp [exclude-matches] *Music* /target_directory 

What should go in place of [exclude-matches] to accomplish this?

Answer 1

In Bash you can do it by enabling the extglob option, like this (replace ls with cp and add the target directory, of course)

~/foobar> shopt extglob extglob        off ~/foobar> ls abar  afoo  bbar  bfoo ~/foobar> ls !(b*) -bash: !: event not found ~/foobar> shopt -s extglob  # Enables extglob ~/foobar> ls !(b*) abar  afoo ~/foobar> ls !(a*) bbar  bfoo ~/foobar> ls !(*foo) abar  bbar 

You can later disable extglob with

shopt -u extglob