How to show only hidden directories, and then find hidden files separately

Question

I'm trying to list all the hidden files in a directory, but not other directories, and I am trying to do this using only ls and grep.

ls -a | egrep  "^\."

This is what I have so far, but the problem is that it also lists hidden directories, when I don't want that.

Then, completely separately, I want to list the hidden directories.

Solution 1

To list only hidden files:

ls -ap | grep -v / | egrep "^\."  

Note that files here is everything that is not a directory. It's not file in "everything in Linux is a file" ;)

To list only hidden directories:

ls -ap | egrep "^\..*/$"  

Comments:

• ls -ap lists everything in the current directory, including hidden ones, and puts a / at the end of directories.
• grep -v / inverts results of grep /, so that no directory is included.
• "^\..*/$" matches everything that start with . and end in /.
• If you want to exclude . and .. directories from results of the second part, you can use -A option instead of -a for ls, or if you like to work with regex, you can use "^\.[^.]+/$" instead of "^\..*/$".

Have fun!

Solution 2

To list the hidden files and directories in the current directory, including . and ..:

echo .*

To list the hidden files and directories in the current directory and its subdirectories recursively:

find . -name '.*'

If you want to save the results to a file, use a redirection:

find . -name '.*' >output-file.txt

Solution 3

Switch to zsh (if you haven't already), and run

ls .*(^/)

The part inside parenthesis is so called glob qualifiers and means to select everything but directories.

If you are interested only in plain files, so want to exclude not only directories, but also other special files (named pipes etc) then try

ls .*(.)

Comments

[zaufi]

why not to use find?? why to limit self w/ ls and grep??

[zaufi]

just for the case (if you don't know about find): 1) find . -maxdepth 1 -name '.*' -type f to find "hidden" files 2) find . -maxdepth 1 -name '.*' -type d to find "hidden" directories

[Rikg09]

Whilst the others did answer the question, you were the only one who listened when I said I only wanted to use ls and grep. I know you can do this using find, but I wanted to be able to do this using only grep and ls, thanks a lot

[muru]

In this context, .* doesn't mean what you think it does.

[Kusalananda]

The regular expression .* matches any string, not just string starting with a dot.

[Pau Coma Ramirez]

echo .[!.]* or echo .[^.]*will list the hidden files and directories, excluding . and ..

[sequence]

ls -aF | egrep "^\.[^.]+/$" | tar -zcvf hiddens.tar.gz -T - doesn't seem to do the trick. It creates an empty archive.