How to use the .* wildcard in bash but exclude the parent directory (..)?

bash wildcard
Allan picture Allan · May 26, 2010 · Viewed 10.7k times · Source

There are often times that I want to execute a command on all files (including hidden files) in a directory. When I try using

chmod g+w * .*

it changes the permissions on all the files I want (in the directory) and all the files in the parent directory (that I want left alone).

Is there a wildcard that does the right thing or do I need to start using find?

Answer

Chris Johnsen picture Chris Johnsen · May 26, 2010

You will need two glob patterns to cover all the potential “dot files”: .[^.]* and ..?*.

The first matches all directory entries with two or more characters where the first character is a dot and the second character is not a dot. The second picks up entries with three or more characters that start with .. (this excludes .. because it only has two characters and starts with a ., but includes (unlikely) entries like ..foo).

chmod g+w .[^.]* ..?*

This should work well in most all shells and is suitable for scripts.

For regular interactive use, the patterns may be too difficult to remember. For those cases, your shell might have a more convenient way to skip . and ... zsh always excludes . and .. from patterns like .*. With bash, you have to use the GLOBIGNORE shell variable.

# bash
GLOBIGNORE=.:..
echo .*

You might consider setting GLOBIGNORE in one of your bash customization files (e.g. .bash_profile/.bash_login or .bashrc). Beware, however, becoming accustomed to this customization if you often use other environments. If you run a command like chmod g+w .* in an environment that is missing your customization, then you will unexpectedly end up including . and .. in your command.

Additionally, you can configure the shells to include “dot files” in patterns that do not start with an explicit dot (e.g. *).

# zsh
setopt glob_dots

# bash
shopt -s dotglob


# show all files, even “dot files”
echo *

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