Ubuntu – Why does the ls command show deleted files

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.}

When you open a bash terminal it loads the content of ~/.bash_history and builds the active shell's history (in the RAM), adding every command executed in that shell to it – and only to it, not to the file.

Only when you close a bash terminal its history is appended to your ~/.bash_history file.

Options of history:

history -a # save the active shell's history to ~/.bash_history (appending)
history -c # clear the active shell's history
history -d NNN # delete row NNN of the active shell's history
history -r # reload the active shell's history from ~/.bash_history (appending)
history -w # save the active shell's history to ~/.bash_history (overwriting)

Options for ~/.bashrc file

If you want to change this behaviour so that the temporary history is saved to ~/.bash_history directly after executing a command, add this line:

PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a"

If you additionally want every terminal to automatically load the ~/.bash_history file after every command execution, add this line instead:

PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; history -c; history -r"

If you want to exclude certain commands (e.g. everything beginning with sudo and cat) from being saved, add this line:

HISTIGNORE="sudo*:cat*"