Its a problem that I’ve come across, and I’m not the only one, so heres what works for me to find those pesky files that start with a .
ls -a | egrep -i "^\."
This only works in the current working directory, which is the normal usage.
FYI the reason that this is problematic is that the ‘.’ symbol is a single character wildcard; most people are familiar with the asterisk ’*’ indicating ‘anything, however long’, whereas the ‘.’ means ‘any single character’.
The command works by looking only at the first character of the file (‘^’, thats called a caret) and then removing the special meaning of ‘.’ by escaping it with the slash.
Update:18/4/10
@stevebiscuit correctly pointed out that the -i flag is unnecessary.
-iinstructs egrep to ignore the case of any matches, so that ‘HeLlO’ matches if you egrep -i for ‘hello’. Since there is no case for the ‘.’ symbol, the -i is pointless.
{ 2 } Comments
If you’re using egrep the -i flag shouldn’t be necessary… This has the same effect:
ls -a | egrep ‘^\.’
Good point; I’m just in the habit of using egrep -i unconsciously. Thanks!
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