How should I glob for all hidden files?

I want to carry out some action (say chown) on all the hidden files in a directory.

I know that this .* is not a good idea because it will also find the current . and parent .. directories (I know that rm will fail to operate on . and .. but other commands, including chown and chmod, will happily take effect)

But all my hidden files have different names!

How should I glob for all hidden files while excluding . and .. ?

In Bash use:

GLOBIGNORE=".:.."

to hide the . and .. directories. This also sets the dotglob option: * matches both hidden and non-hidden files.

You can also do:

shopt -s dotglob

Gilles :)

You can use the following extglob pattern:

.@(!(.|))

• . matches a literal . at first

• @() is a extglob pattern, will match one of the patterns inside, as we have only one pattern inside it, it will pick that

• !(.|) is another extglob pattern (nested), which matches any file with no or one .; As we have matched . at start already, this whole pattern will match all files starting with . except . and ...

extglob is enabled on interactive sessions of bash by default in Ubuntu. If not, enable it first:

shopt -s extglob

Example:

$ echo .@(!(.|))
.bar .foo .spam