How to list files without directories, and filter by name (ls options)

GNU ls (i.e. the ls command on non-embedded Linux systems and Cygwin, also available on some other unices) has an option to hide some files, based on their names. There's no way to ignore directories though.

ls --hide='t_*' uploads

Another approach is to make your shell do the matching. Bash, ksh and zsh have a negation pattern !(t_*) to match all files except those matching t*; in bash this feature needs to be turned on with shopt -s extglob, and in zsh it needs to be turned on with setopt ksh_glob. Zsh also has the equivalent syntax ^t_* which needs to be turned on with setopt extended_glob. This still doesn't ignore directories. Zsh has an extra feature that allows to match files not only by name but also by metadata and more: glob qualifiers. Add (.) at the end of a match to restrict to regular files. The negation ^ is part of the name matching syntax, so ^t_*(.) means “all regular files not matching t_*” and not “all files that aren't regular files matching t_*”.

setopt extended_glob  # put this in your ~/.zshrc
ls uploads/^t_*(.)

If you find yourself without advanced tools, you can do this on any unix with find. It's not the kind of thing you'd typically type on the command line, but it's powerful and precise. Caleb has already shown how to do this with GNU find. The -maxdepth option isn't portable; you can use -prune instead, to portably stop find from recursing.

find uploads/* -type d -prune -o \! -type f -name 't_*' -print

Replace -print by -exec ls -lG -- {} + to execute ls with your favorite options on the files.

All the commands above hide dot files (i.e. files whose name begins with a .). If you want to display them, pass -A to ls, or add the D glob qualifier in zsh (ls uploads/^t_*(.D)). With find, you can use a different approach of making it recurse one level only (find doesn't treat dot files specially). This only fully works if you run find in the current directory.

cd uploads && find . -name . -o -type d -prune -o \! -type f -name 't_*' -print

ls -l /folder | grep ^- | awk '{print $9}'

ls -l | grep -v ^d | grep name$

I found these short ways:

ls -p uploads | grep -Ev '/'

or

ls -pIt_* uploads | grep -v /

Let me give it a shot using ls and pipes:

ls  -l --hide='t_*'  uploads/ | grep -v ^d | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 9

say last column is the 9th one.

If find's -maxdepth portability issue is a concern, you could use:

ls -l uploads/ | awk '/^-/ && $9 !~/^t_/ {print $9}'

I'm not an expert, but I think this should work. I suppose it looks a little cryptic, but if you speak awk, it's really not. $NF could be used instead of $9. You could also do:

ls -l uploads/ | awk '/^-/' | awk '!/^t_/ {print $9}'

which does the same thing (but perhaps less efficiently than the former ???).

Actually, after thinking about the other posts, it looks like

ls -l --hide=t_* uploads/ | awk '/^-/ {print $9}'

is an even shorter and clearer way.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. :-)

To filter out directories, you could use ls with -p, which appends a slash to directory names, then grep out the lines containing slashes:

$ ls -p | grep -v '/'

To simultaneously exclude filenames which follow a certain pattern, you might use grep e.g. with -e to chain multiple patterns (there are several different ways in which this could be achieved with grep), or ls with -I/--ignore.

With grep, the following could be done to also match lines starting with t_ (now using the directory you mentioned wanting to parse in this example):

$ ls -p uploads | grep -v -e '/' -e '^t_'

With ls, you'd use the formatting already suggested by others for --hide.
The reason why I'd recommend -I/--ignore over --hide is that the former will continue to work when you add -a or -A as additional arguments; the latter won't!* Full example for both long and short form version:

$ ls -p --ignore='t_*' uploads | grep -v '/'
$ ls -pI 't_*' uploads | grep -v '/'

*from GNU Coreutils:

‘--hide=PATTERN’
     In directories, ignore files whose names match the shell pattern
     PATTERN, unless the ‘--all’ (‘-a’) or ‘--almost-all’ (‘-A’) is also
     given.  This option acts like ‘--ignore=PATTERN’ except that it has
     no effect if ‘--all’ (‘-a’) or ‘--almost-all’ (‘-A’) is also given.

Try this alias and use it:

alias l='ls -hLlF'

Easy peasy:

ls -l --hide 't_*' <absolute path to desired directory> | grep -v ^d