What is the purpose of shopt -s extglob
I wanted to delete all the files from directory except the one. I found my solution here. This solution is using a command
shopt -s extglob
I wanted to know what this command is exactly doing, some back end knowledge. I also added a comment on this answer but did not got a reply till now. As a new user to Ubuntu I am curious to know what this command is doing.
In simple terms, globbing refers to pattern matching. Bash uses simple globbing like, echo l*
which expand to list of files in current directory that start with letter l
. Of course , as you can guess, it's simple and limited.
Enter extglob
. As you can guess, it stands for extended globbing
. This option allows for more advanced pattern matching. From man bash
:
extglob If set, the extended pattern matching features described
above under Pathname Expansion are enabled.
And a little before that:
If the extglob shell option is enabled using the shopt builtin, several
extended pattern matching operators are recognized. In the following
description, a pattern-list is a list of one or more patterns separated
by a |. Composite patterns may be formed using one or more of the
following sub-patterns:
?(pattern-list)
Matches zero or one occurrence of the given patterns
*(pattern-list)
Matches zero or more occurrences of the given patterns
+(pattern-list)
Matches one or more occurrences of the given patterns
@(pattern-list)
Matches one of the given patterns
!(pattern-list)
Matches anything except one of the given patterns
There's multitude of ways in which extglob
can be used. Quite a few good examples are provided in Linux Journal and Greg's wiki.