[Techtalk] real life kewl text-processing

Travis Casey efindel at earthlink.net
Sat Jan 10 17:23:19 EST 2004


On Saturday 10 January 2004 16:13, Akkana Peck wrote:

> Hey, I have a micro-tip that might come in handy.
>
> Have you ever wanted to do something with all your dot files
> (files and directories that hold your various preferences and
> settings, like .login, .mozilla, .gnome, .xinitrc and so forth),
> perhaps back them up somewhere -- and found that using .* doesn't
> work because that gets . and .. as well?
>
> When I want to access all the dotfiles in the current directory,
> but not . or .., I use this pattern: .??*
> In English, that means: "Everything that begins with a dot, then
> has at least two additional characters after the dot."
>
> Of course, this won't match files like .a, which doesn't bother me.
> You could make a pattern which would also match such files, but
> it would be more difficult to type, whereas .??* is very easy.

I've always found .[a-z]* to be useful for that...

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