33

Just witting a simple shell script and little confused:

Here is my script:

% for f in $FILES; do echo "Processing $f file.."; done

The Command: 

ls -la | grep bash

produces:

% ls -a | grep bash
.bash_from_cshrc
.bash_history
.bash_profile
.bashrc

When 

FILES=".bash*"

I get the same results (different formatting) as ls -a. However when 

FILES="*bash*"

I get this output:

Processing *bash* file..

This is not the expected output and not what I expect. Am I not allowed to have a wild card at the beginning of the file name? Is the . at the beginning of the file name "special" somehow?

Setting

FILES="bash*"

Also does not work.

7ochem
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sixtyfootersdude
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6 Answers6

64

The default globbing in bash does not include filenames starting with a . (aka hidden files).

You can change that with

shopt -s dotglob

$ ls -a
.  ..  .a  .b  .c  d  e  f
$ ls *
d  e  f
$ shopt -s dotglob
$ ls *
.a  .b  .c  d  e  f
$

To disable it again, run shopt -u dotglob.

fedorqui
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nos
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17

If you want hidden and non hidden, set dotglob (bash)

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s dotglob
for file in *
do
 echo "$file"
done
msrd0
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ghostdog74
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11

FILES=".bash*" works because the hidden files name begin with a .

FILES="bash*" doesn't work because the hidden files name begin with a . not a b

FILES="*bash*" doesn't work because the * wildcard at the beginning of a string omits hidden files.

Lance Roberts
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gregseth
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    So if I want to do it I should do FILES=".*bash*"? But what if I want hidden AND not hidden files? – sixtyfootersdude Jan 25 '10 at 21:42
  • This is slightly confused because the quotes prevent the wildcards from expanding at all. The expansion happens when you _use_ `$FILES`, unquoted. – tripleee Apr 21 '22 at 02:48
11

Yes, the . at the front is special, and normally won't be matched by a * wildcard, as documented in the bash man page (and common to most Unix shells):

When a pattern is used for pathname expansion, the character “.” at the start of a name or immediately following a slash must be matched explicitly, unless the shell option dotglob is set. When matching a pathname, the slash character must always be matched explicitly. In other cases, the “.” character is not treated specially.

alanc
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4

If you want to include hidden files, you can specify two wildcards; one for the hidden files, and another for the others.

for f in .[!.]* *; do
    echo "Processing $f file.."
done

The wildcard .* would expand to all the dot files, but that includes the parent directory, which you normally would want to exclude; so .[!.]* matches all files whose first character is a dot, but the second one isn't.

If you have other files with two leading dots, you need to specify a third wildcard to cover those but exclude the parent directory! Try ..?* which requires there to be at least one character after the second dot.

tripleee
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1
for file in directory/{.[!.]*,*};do echo $file;done

Should echo either hidden files and normal file. Thanks to tripleee for the .[!.]* tip. The curly brackets permits a 'or' in the pattern matching. {pattern1,pattern2}

douardo
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