Ubuntu – How to Search for Files Recursively into Subdirectories

ls -al .* shows the contents of all directories in the current directory whose names begin with . (ie all those matching the shell glob .*)

In Bash, the .* glob resolves to . and .. as well. Since . represents the current directory, and .. the parent directory, the contents of both of these directories, including any hidden files and directories, are shown too.¹

.* also catches hidden files in the current directory, but they are listed anyway as contents of .

As explained in What does `ls --directory` stand for? the -d flag causes the directories themselves to be displayed, instead of their contents.

¹_{this is also the case in dash, which is the shell symlinked to sh in Ubuntu. However, other shells, including zsh and mksh, behave more intuitively and don't include . and .. when expanding .*. It is also worth noting that, while most commands will operate on .. and . when they are included in a .* glob (including chmod and chown - you can really mess up your system with those), the rm command will helpfully fail by design to do so.}