CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashshellwildcard
Chris
Chris

Reputation: 329

Get confused about square brackets in Bash

as the document describes,[set] in Bash can match any character in set,

in the following , I hava 3 dirs called a,b,c in current directory:


$ ls

a b c



$ ls [abd]   # just as expected,show dirs a and b

a:



b:



$ ls [bd]    # expecting show dir b but noting matched



$ ls [ad]    # expecting show dir a but noting matched

can someone explain this to me?thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 74

Answers (1)

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785581

This is correct behavior.

ls [bd]

Prints files inside the directory b and that is empty.

To test further you can do:

touch b/foo
ls [bd]

Which will give output

foo

PS: However in your first command when you do ls [abc] there are more than one matching directories in current path a and b hence you get the output as shown in in your question.

Upvotes: 4

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