I would like to be able to list all files within a folder which have a certain character as the third character. For each file, I then want to be able to perform an action, maybe delete or move. I've looked at the ls command, with grep/cut options, but I can't see how to get final list that I can then process.
Thanks.
You can also use "find" command to find files and perform an action for each file individually.
find <directory_name> -name '??t*' -exec mv {} <target_directory> \;
-mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 to only find files in that one directory.
ls ??t* | xargs -I {} mv {} <target_directory>
mkdir -p targetdir && mv ??t* targetdir...
ls | xargs when you can do it with find and do it right ? That is, if recursion is needed, otherwise you can simply glob - either way there's no point using ls.
You can do some pattern matching directly in the shell without invoking external programs.
Let's say you have a folder with the following files:
$ ls
ant bat bird cat cats dog fish
You could match only files 3 characters long ending in t like this:
$ ls ??t
ant bat cat
You could match any file with the 3rd character as t like this:
$ ls ??t*
ant bat cat cats
See more documentation here: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Pattern-Matching.html
ls is not a good candidate for this job.
for f in ??t*; do stuff with $f; done ?