Originally posted by: JoachimB

I'm looking for a pattern that would match any file or directory except '.' and '..'

So e.g. it should return:

test

.test

t

test_test

etc

Any ideas? Thanks ...

I want to use it on a chown -R command and want to avoid it to run into '.' and '..'.

Originally posted by: Wouter Liefting

That would be * .[!.]*

The first star matches all filenames that are not hidden. The second stanza matches all hidden files of two characters or more (including the leading dot), where the second character is not a dot.

Originally posted by: JoachimB

Brilliant, thank you!

Unfortunately I don't understand that two stanzas can be stringed together and that this is interpreted as "match a or b".

Can't find any word about this in David G. Korn's "The new Kornshell" (my ksh bible).