List all the files ending with 10 or 11 or 12

Question

To list all the files ending with 10 or 11 or 12 I have tried ls *[10-12] and ls *[10,11,12] but these are not working. I don't know why. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

[...] matches one character (collating element in some shells) if it's in the specified set.

[10-12] means either character 1 or characters from 0 to 1 or character 2 so the same as [102] or [0-2]¹.

[10,11,12] means either 1, 0, ,, 1... So the same as [,0-2].

Here you want:

ls -d -- *1[0-2]

That is, (non-hidden) filenames that end in 1 followed by any of the 0, 1 or 2 characters.

Now beware that it also matches foo110 or foo112345612.

If you don't want that, then you'd need something like:

ls -d -- *[!0-9]1[0-2] 1[0-2]

That would however not match foo010

If out of foo10, foo00010, foo110 you want foo10 and foo00010 to match, then with ksh or bash -O extglob or zsh -o kshglob:

ls -d -- !(*[0-9])*(0)1[0-2]

Note that except with zsh, if any of those pattern's don't match, the patterns will be passed as-is to ls, so you may end up listing unwanted files if there are files named like that. With bash, you can set the failglob option to work around that.

zsh is the only shell that has a glob operator to match ranges of numbers.

ls -d -- *<10-12>

would match files ending in a number from 10 to 12. It would also match foo110 since that's foo1 followed by 10. You could do (with extendedglob):

ls -d -- (^*[0-9])<10-12>

though.

zsh is also the shell that introduced the {10..12} type of brace expansion (copied by ksh93 and bash a few years later).

However, like the {10,11,12} equivalent, that is not globbing. That's a form of expansion that is done before globbing.

ls -d -- *{10..12}

is first expanded to:

ls -d -- *10 *11 *12

If any of those 3 globs fails, then the command is aborted in zsh (and bash -O failglob).

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^{¹ though note that in several shells and locales, including bash on a GNU system in a typical UTF-8 locale such as en_US.UTF-8, [0-1] may match on a lot more characters than just 0 and 1 including things like ٠۰߀०০੦૦୦௦౦౸೦൦෦๐໐༠༳၀႐០៰᠐᥆᧐᪀᪐᭐᮰᱀᱐⁰₀↉⓪⓿〇㍘꘠꣐꤀꧐꧰꩐꯰０}

Answer 2

Try this :

ls *{10,11,12}

or

ls -l *{10,11,12}

(cannot show hidden files)

Answer 3

This should work:

ls -d -- *1[0-2]

Remember that [] represents a set of characters and in case of numbers it can go from [0-9]

Answer 4

ls *@(10|11|12) is what you're looking for.

This requires extglob to be enabled using shopt, i.e., shopt -s extglob. In addition, you can append that line to ~/.bashrc to permanently enable it.

For more information on why this works, see the official Bash manual page on pattern matching.