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I'm trying to count all files in a directory that match a pattern, recursively, using ls:

ls -R | grep *.{cpp,h} | wc

However, I get:

zsh: no matches found: *.cpp

ls -R does return results, though:

$ ls -R CMakeLists.txt cmake src

./cmake: Modules SUBS.cmake

./cmake/Modules: FindGecode.cmake

./src: A1_examples.h Sub1Main.cpp Sudoku.cpp Sudoku.h nQueens.cpp

Why doesn't grep find the *.cpp files that ls -R returns?

Edit: I'm also pretty sure that ls -R | grep *.{cpp,h} | wc is not the best way to do this, because of the way that ls returns multiple results on single lines, but I'm not certain.

simont
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  • what kind of syntax is {cpp,h} ? – barlop Apr 09 '12 at 12:01
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    As to the multiline: compare ls to ls | cat sometime. ls is smart enough to do multicolumn only when reporting directly (or when told to do so explicitly); it assumes -C for terminals and -1 for pipes. – geekosaur Apr 09 '12 at 12:07

1 Answers1

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You're making two different mistakes that play together. First, you need to quote the pattern sent to grep, otherwise the shell will expand it first. (That's where the error message comes from.) Second, grep does not accept shell globs, it wants a regex.

zsh being what it is, you may want to say

$ ls **/*.{cpp,h} | wc -l

instead, using a zsh-style recursive glob. If you want to use the other one, it's

$ ls -R | egrep '\.(cpp|h)$' | wc -l
geekosaur
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  • Thanks. I've just been trying to get it working with plain grep rather than egrep (because I didn't know what the differences were). For my future reference: egrep is grep -E (enabled use of extended regular expressions; the brackets in the answer only work if the regular expression is an extended one). – simont Apr 09 '12 at 12:31
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    egrep is the original; grep -E is a GNUism. Also a GNUism is that you can use escaping instead: grep '\.\(cpp\|h\)'. Neither is portable. – geekosaur Apr 09 '12 at 12:32