Red Hat Academy Managing Files with File Globbing Online Exercises

Jwood1988 · 09-08-2009, 05:07 PM

From /usr/share/tcl8.4/encoding directory

Copy all files whose first four characters are composed of exactly three letters followed by a number into the directory xxxn

I have tried like every command i can think of just to get three letters and followed by any numbers
i've tried cp /usr/share/tcl8.4/encoding/???[a-z]*[0123456789].*
and a bunch of others but they either bring cp855 which is only two letters or just straight letters i need Help

thanx in advance and to think this is only Workbook 2 in linux class i'm in trouble

chrism01 · 09-08-2009, 08:04 PM

I'd use ls |grep <pattern>, see http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/regexpr.html

Jwood1988 · 09-09-2009, 06:55 AM

Chris Thanx for the reply but i'm in the beginning of learning Linux and we have not got to the grep command so i really couldn't figure it out i'm still really new

Okay i finally figured it out to list the results from the directory /usr/share/tcl8.4/encoding/
that contain three letters followed by a number i typed the command
cp /usr/share/tcl8.4/encoding/??[a-z][0-9]*.enc ~/xxxn/

This is the online Exercise Answer For the last one in Workbook 2 Chapter 5.

chrism01 · 09-09-2009, 07:41 PM

Quote:

The asterisk -- * -- matches any number of repeats of the character string or RE preceding it, including zero.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/regexp.html

That's not 'exactly three letters followed by a number' unless by number they don't mean digit (which it sounds like they do in fact want).
You need some carefully named test files eg

a1
ab2
abc3
abcd4
abc67
ab678
89a
89abc

Only one of these matches the requirement...