How do I list files which have a "s" as first and a "l" as last char with a shell-command?

Question

I'm trying to list files that start with "s" and with "l".

The command I'm trying is ls -l *sfa*

Answer 1

The question is not very clear... based on your comment to @cmks, here are two options:

1. If you are looking for files where the first character of the filename is "s" and the last is "l" - then use ls -l s*l

2. If you are looking for files where the first character of the filename is (either "a" or "s") and the last is (either "a" or "l") - then use ls [as]*[al]

If it's something else, please edit your question to clarify...

Your version ls -l sfa will only list files with the exact name "sfa" (or, if there's a directory with that name, any files in that directory). It doesn't do what you seem to be looking for.

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The rules for matching file names ("globbing") are quite simple:

1. "?" matches any single character
2. "*" matches any number (zero or more) of characters
3. Use square brackets ([]) to match a single character from a collection: [fqsb] matches either f, q, s, or b; [b-d] matches b, c, or d
4. Use curly braces ({}} to match one of several specific strings: {foo,bar} matches either "foo" or "bar".

The directory separator "/" is excluded from matching - matching is only done on filenames.

See also ShellGlobbing in Ubuntu help.

Answer 2

ls -l s*l
ls -l s?l

• A "*" means 0 or more characters
• If you want an exact amount of letters between the "s" and the "l" a "?" means 1 char. 2 "??'s means 2 characters.
• You can also put collections in between []. So ls -l s[a-z]l would limit it to sal through szl

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From comments:

If you want files beginning with "s" and "a" you can use a collection:

ls -l [sa]*

will list all files beginning with those 2 letters. You can use that to create all kinds of groups. Exampe [sa][df][1ojwfihwef]* would make it search for file beginning with 3 letters that each match that specific group

Answer 3

You may give more than one parameter to the ls command at a time:

ls -l H* *l

What happens is, the shell does a Pathname Expansion. You may read more about it in the manual pages of bash:

man bash

Because the shell does it, the shell calls the command ls as follows:

ls -l Hejo Hesja Hejan Lesl Lesil Lesul Lestl

It is imported to understand, it is not the ls command but the shell who looks for matching pathnames.

Answer 4

Aside from using ls command and shell's wildcards, one could use find command as well.

$ find -maxdepth 1 -iname "s*l"                                                                       
./script.pl
./storm carl
./sal
./simple_curl