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.

Answer 1

To list only hidden files:

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

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 | grep "^\..*/$"  

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!

Answer 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

Answer 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 .*(.)

Answer 4

Try this command:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '.*' | sed 's/^..//'

This will find only files (-type f) in the current directory (-maxdepth 1), starting with a '.', the sed command gets rid of './' in every line.

Answer 5

To list hidden files (long list extensive format)

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '.*' -ls | sed 's/^..//'

To list directories (a long format)

find -maxdepth 1 -type d -name '.*' -ls | sed 's/^..//'

Answer 6

List files:

tree --prune -aiL 1 -P .[^.]\* path/to/dir

List directories:

tree -daiL 1 -I [^.]\* path/to/dir

The first line displays the checked directory, and the last line displays the report. However, the report can be disabled with adding the --noreport flag.
path/do/dir - If this parameter is omitted, the current directory . is used.

Answer 7

This command works:

ls -a | grep ".*"

• Any hidden file starts with .

• * matches all characters