bash Cookbook

Showing All Hidden (dot) Files in the Current Directory

Problem

You want to see only hidden (dot) files in a directory to edit a file you forget the name of or remove obsolete files. ls -a shows all files, including normally hidden ones, but that is often too noisy, and ls -a .* doesn’t do what you think it will.

Solution

Use ls-d along with whatever other criteria you have.

ls -d .*
ls -d .b*
ls -d .[!.]*

Or construct your wildcard in such a way that . and .. don’t match.

$ grep -l 'PATH' ~/.[!.]*
/home/jp/.bash_history
/home/jp/.bash_profile

Discussion

Due to the way the shell handles file wildcards, the sequence .* does not behave as you might expect or desire. The way filename expansion or globbing works is that any string containing the characters *, ?, or [ is treated as a pattern, and replaced by an alphabetically sorted list of file names matching the pattern. * matches any string, including the null string, while ? matches any single character. Characters enclosed in [] specify a list or range of characters, any of which will match. There are also various extended pattern-matching operators that we’re not going to cover here (see “Pattern-Matching Characters” and “extglob Extended Pattern-Matching Operators” in Appendix A). So *.txt means any file ending in .txt, while *txt means any file ending in txt (no dot). f?o would match foo or fao but not fooo. So you’d think that .* would match any file beginning with a dot.

The problem is that .* is expanded to include . and .., which ...