How to delete all hidden files and directories using Bash?

The obvious solution produces an exit code of 1:

bash$ rm -rf .*
rm: cannot remove directory `.'
rm: cannot remove directory `..'
bash$ echo $?
1

One possible solution will skip the "." and ".." directories but will only delete files whose names are longer than 3 characters:

bash$ rm -f .??*

Solution 1:

rm -rf .[^.] .??*

Should catch all cases. The .??* will only match 3+ character filenames (as explained in previous answer), the .[^.] will catch any two character entries (other than ..).

Solution 2:

find -path './.*' -delete

This matches all files in the current directory which start with a . and deletes these recursively. Hidden files in non-hidden directories are not touched.

In case you really wanted to wipe everything from a directory, find -delete would suffice.