How to show only hidden directories, and then find hidden files separately

directorydot-filesfilenamesgrepls

I'm trying to list all the hidden files in a directory, but not other directories, and I am trying to do this using only ls and grep.

ls -a | egrep  "^\."

This is what I have so far, but the problem is that it also lists hidden directories, when I don't want that.

Then, completely separately, I want to list the hidden directories.

Best Answer

To list only hidden files: 

ls -ap | grep -v / | egrep "^\."

Note that files here is everything that is not a directory. It's not file in "everything in Linux is a file" ;)

To list only hidden directories: 

ls -ap | egrep "^\..*/$"

Comments:

  • ls -ap lists everything in the current directory, including hidden ones, and puts a / at the end of directories.
  • grep -v / inverts results of grep /, so that no directory is included.
  • "^\..*/$" matches everything that start with . and end in /.
  • If you want to exclude . and .. directories from results of the second part, you can use -A option instead of -a for ls, or if you like to work with regex, you can use "^\.[^.]+/$" instead of "^\..*/$".

Have fun!

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