How To Select Files Using A Pattern

You can use this simple trick to select files easily using a pattern:

To do so, you need to invoke the Select Items Matching window from within Nautilus by pressing Ctrl+S. Using this window, you can input a pattern that consists of two parts:

1. The search term (common parts of the file names).
2. Wild card characters.

The wild card characters available are:

1. * to search for any number of characters.
2. ? to search for a predefined number of characters.

Examples:

To select all the files that have the same prefix regardless of their extensions, use this pattern:

PREFIX.*

This pattern will select all the files that have the string PREFIX in their file names like: PREFIX.pdf, PREFIX.png and so on.

If you have a list of photos that are named like: Photo-01-03-2012.jpg, Photo-03-22-2012.jpg, you can select them all using this pattern:

Photo-??-??-????.jpg