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up vote 2 down vote favorite

I'm trying to list all files and select only certain from them. ls -1 return me the list

abc 
abcd
rm_0818-051752-753-06

after that I want to select only by this criteria to return the 3rd line so I do:

ls -1 | grep -E "^rm_.*"

but I get nothing.

I'm trying to recognize the first character of 3rd line in this way:

var=$(ls -1 | grep -E "rm_")
echo $var //returns rm_0818-051752-753-06
echo ${var:0:1} //returns some strange symbol 001B in square

Can you explain me this behavior and how could I grep by first character ^? Thanks

share|improve this question
up vote 3 down vote accepted

ls -1 | grep -E "^rm_.*" looks good and should work. Possible reason why it doesn't work is alias bound to ls command in your profile.
To ensure, try /bin/ls -1 | grep -E "^rm_.*"

share|improve this answer
1  
absolutely right! – viavad 2 hours ago
up vote 5 down vote

It sounds like you have grep aliased to grep --color=always or similar. You can check this by running type grep. I can reproduce a similar behavior:

$ var=$(ls -1 | grep --color=always "^rm")
$ echo ${var:0:1}
## Weird boxed character appears here

To see what's happening a bit better, we can pass $var through od:

$ echo "$var" | od -c
0000000 033   [   0   1   ;   3   1   m 033   [   K   r   m 033   [   m
0000020 033   [   K   _   0   8   1   8   -   0   5   1   7   5   2   -
0000040   7   5   3   -   0   6  \n
0000047

The 033 [ 0 1 ; 3 1 m 033 [ K are ANSI color escapes, and that's what's breaking here. You can avoid that by using an unaliased version of grep:

/bin/grep '^rm_'

or

\grep '^rm_'

Even better, don't parse ls since that often leads to other problems. A safer and simpler way of doing what you want is:

$ var="rm*"
$ echo $var
rm_0818-051752-753-06
$ echo ${var:0:1}
r
share|improve this answer
    
absolutely right! – viavad 2 hours ago
    
very useful information – viavad 2 hours ago
1  
In var="rm*" (or var=rm*), you're assigning rm* literally to $var, not rm_0818-051752-753-06. It's because you used the split+glob operator in the next line (echo $var), that you get rm_0818-051752-753-06 there. The echo ${var:0:1} will extract the r from rm*, not rm_0818-051752-753-06 – Stéphane Chazelas 1 hour ago
up vote 4 down vote

Why grep, why not just: 

ls -1 rm_*
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