glob exclude pattern

You can deduct sets and cast it back as a list:

list(set(glob("*")) - set(glob("eph*")))

You can't exclude patterns with the glob function, globs only allow for inclusion patterns. Globbing syntax is very limited (even a [!..] character class must match a character, so it is an inclusion pattern for every character that is not in the class).

You'll have to do your own filtering; a list comprehension usually works nicely here:

files = [fn for fn in glob('somepath/*.txt') 
         if not os.path.basename(fn).startswith('eph')]

Compared with glob, I recommend pathlib. Filtering one pattern is very simple.

from pathlib import Path

p = Path(YOUR_PATH)
filtered = [x for x in p.glob("**/*") if not x.name.startswith("eph")]

And if you want to filter a more complex pattern, you can define a function to do that, just like:

def not_in_pattern(x):
    return (not x.name.startswith("eph")) and not x.name.startswith("epi")


filtered = [x for x in p.glob("**/*") if not_in_pattern(x)]

Using that code, you can filter all files that start with eph or start with epi.

The pattern rules for glob are not regular expressions. Instead, they follow standard Unix path expansion rules. There are only a few special characters: two different wild-cards, and character ranges are supported [from pymotw: glob – Filename pattern matching].

So you can exclude some files with patterns.
For example to exclude manifests files (files starting with _) with glob, you can use:

files = glob.glob('files_path/[!_]*')