2.7 Dot Files

Change to your home directory if you’re not already there, type ls to take a look around, and then run ls -a. Do you see the difference in the output? When you run ls without the -a, you won’t see the configuration files called dot files. These are files and directories whose names begin with a dot (.). Common dot files are .bashrc and .login, and there are dot directories, too, such as .ssh.

There’s nothing special about dot files or directories. Some programs don’t show them by default so that you won’t see a complete mess when listing the contents of your home directory. For example, ls doesn’t list dot files unless you use the -a option. In addition, shell globs don’t match dot files unless you explicitly use a pattern such as .*.

note

You can run into problems with globs because .* matches . and .. (the current and parent directories). You may wish to use a pattern such as .[^.]* or .??* to get all dot files except the current and parent directories.