ls -d [a-z]* displays same as ls -d [A-Z]*

trrose · 09-02-2008, 10:10 PM

According to General Linux I (Exam Cram) by Dulaney pg 17, ls -d [a-z]* should only display files that begin with a lowercase letter. I've also tried [A-Z] as you can see. According to Dulaney they should behave differently given the files I'm trying to list but they don't.

----------------
$ ls -d [A-Z]*
Desktop DIR_COLORS Documents Junk JUNK junk1 Music Pictures Public Templates Videos

$ ls -d [a-z]*
Desktop DIR_COLORS Documents Junk JUNK junk1 Music Pictures Public Templates Videos
----------------

As a side note, is the Dulaney book helpful in passing the LPI Gen. Lin. 101 exam? I've been using Linux at home for years and am fairly familiar with bash which I'm using now.
Regards, Tom
p.s. Great site! I just signed up.

drewbug01 · 09-03-2008, 12:36 AM

Same results on my machine, when running BASH:

Code:

andrew@the-haystack:~$ ls -d [a-z]*
Desktop    Examples                Music  Pictures  test1  Videos
Documents  gtk-gnutella-downloads  PDF    storage   test2
andrew@the-haystack:~$

Notice the different results when I simply run sh, not bash:

Code:

$ ls -d [a-z]*
gtk-gnutella-downloads  storage  test1  test2
$ ls -d [A-Z]*
Desktop  Documents  Examples  Music  PDF  Pictures  Videos

Hope this helps!

Tinkster · 09-03-2008, 01:04 AM

Notice that sensible distributions like Slackware (using bash)
also give the correct result ...

Code:

$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash
$ ls
AAA  aaaa  BBB  bbbb  CCC  cccc
$ ls -d [a-z]*
aaaa  bbbb  cccc
$ ls -d [A-Z]*
AAA  BBB  CCC

So that faulty output is not a bash, but a Ubuntu feature.

I'd be looking at my initialisation scripts, and ~/.bashrc
and/or ~/.bash_{profile|login}

Cheers,
Tink

chrism01 · 09-03-2008, 01:09 AM

"The asterisk -- * -- matches any number of repeats of the character string or RE preceding it, including zero(!) instances."

That's my exclamation mark

from http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x16044.html

Tinkster · 09-03-2008, 01:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrism01

"The asterisk -- * -- matches any number of repeats of the character string or RE preceding it, including zero(!) instances."

That's my exclamation mark :)

from http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x16044.html

But in the case of

Code:

ls -ld [A-Z]*

there's no regex, it's shell-globbing. And it
means any capital letter followed by anything
else (or nothing).

Cheers,
Tink

drewbug01 · 09-03-2008, 01:32 AM

Hmmm.....

Created a test account, blasted away the .bashrc file, and still same results.
[code]test@the-haystack:~$ ls -l .bashrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 test test 1 2008-09-03 02:30 .bashrc
test@the-haystack:~$ mkdir test TEST
test@the-haystack:~$ ls
Examples test TEST
test@the-haystack:~$ ls -d [a-z]*
Examples test TEST

matthewg42 · 09-03-2008, 02:10 AM

There are some shopt settings for case sensitivity in glob patterns, nocaseglob and nocasematch. For some reason on Ubuntu, these have no impact on the OP's command... Looks like an Ubuntu bug to me.

chrism01 · 09-03-2008, 03:11 AM

See also answer to E9 here: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/bash/ . Appears to be locale dependent.

trrose · 09-03-2008, 07:53 PM

Thanks to all of you. I read every word. Hey Chris, thanks alot for the link to gnu.bash.bug. I guess it's logical but unconventional, I think. However, perhaps it's conventional among programmers. That question is an interesting departure point on human communication and how we change registers (Linguistic term I think) depending on the group we're communicating with at the moment.
Regards, Tom

chrism01 · 09-03-2008, 08:24 PM

Actually, having tested your prob in my system, even after having reset lang to en_GB, still had same prob. (my post #8)

Set this

export LC_COLLATE=C

in my /etc/profile and its all good now ie distinguishes between case.
(have to completely logout/in for it to take effect).

Tinkster · 09-03-2008, 08:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrism01

See also answer to E9 here: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/bash/ . Appears to be locale dependent.

And confirming that one ...

My default locale settings (specifically LANG) are
en_US (with LC_COLLATE=C), and the "normal" behaviour
occurs. I've also checked on a machine running SLED
with LANG=POSIX and LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 being the only
locale relevant settings, same thing. On an Ubuntu box,
as soon as I set LANG=POSIX, ls output becomes "normal"
(in other words as I've been used to for the last 11
years ;D) ... won't spend much time on researching it
further, though.

Cheers,
Tink