Yes, I am painfully aware of the power of zsh :) But in this case I need to do my script with bash and it seems that although globbing for directories is trivial ( */ ) there is no similar pattern to match files.
I don't know if it's just me, but I tried your syntax to list directories and that doesn't work for me. You use: $ ls [^.]*/ correct? All that does on my system is list all files, including files in any subfolders within the current directory. Basically seems to do the exact same as if I do: $ ls * Jacques B.