if I run the following command in my mac terminal:
ls -al | grep ^\.
or
ls -al | grep '^\.'
or
ls -al | grep "^\."
I get no results back even though there are several files in my home directory that meet this criteria. I tried this in both bash and zsh, and get nothing.
If I run this same command without quotes in Ubuntu, I get the expected results. Can anyone explain why this is?
Best Answer
The grep pattern matches lines that begin with a dot. The output of
ls -al
has no such lines.Try
ls -a | grep '^\.'
and see the difference.