How can I grep hidden files?

grep hidden-files dotfiles
Steven Penny picture Steven Penny · Apr 29, 2012 · Viewed 89.4k times · Source

I am searching through a Git repository and would like to include the .git folder.

grep does not include this folder if I run

grep -r search *

What would be a grep command to include this folder?

Answer

bitmask picture bitmask · Apr 29, 2012

Please refer to the solution at the end of this post as a better alternative to what you're doing.

You can explicitly include hidden files (a directory is also a file).

grep -r search * .*

The * will match all files except hidden ones and .* will match only hidden files. However this will fail if there are either no non-hidden files or no hidden files in a given directory. You could of course explicitly add .git instead of .*.

However, if you simply want to search in a given directory, do it like this:

grep -r search .

The . will match the current path, which will include both non-hidden and hidden files.

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