Shell and batch operations on hidden files but not on ".." & "."

danielsbrewer · 09-12-2007, 05:50 AM

In the shell, is it possible to perform a recursive batch action on all of the hidden files but not on ".." & "."?

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Acting as root, I wanted to change the all the hidden files in a user's home directory including the contents of any hidden directory. So I did this:

chown -R user.group .*

This ended up changing not only the hidden files/directories but the normal files and directories and worst of all /home and everything within it.

I am assuming that I similar thing would happen if I tried the command rm -rf .* i.e. the contents of all parent directories up to "/" would be deleted.

The problem is that ".." and "." are picked up by .*.

Any ideas of how to perform these sort of actions correctly?

blackhole54 · 09-12-2007, 06:22 AM

Use .[^.]*

for example, to list all hidden files and directories but not . and ..

Code:

ls -d .[^.]*

Try it out with something where you can't do any damage first.

danielsbrewer · 09-12-2007, 06:46 AM

Thanks that worked great

blackhole54 · 09-12-2007, 07:42 AM

I just realized that .[^.]* will miss files that start with two dots! But you probably don't have too many of those. .*[^.]* is a little better, but will still miss files that consist of nothing but dots (for example, 3 dots only). I can't think of anything that completely meets your criterion.

CORRECTION: (albeit probably just an academic one!) You can cover all bases by using two globbing expressions:

Code:

ls -d .*[^.]* ...*

CORRECTION2: Drat! The above will (potentially) list some files twice. For this (probably) totally academic excercise, lets see if the third time is the charm:

Code:

ls -d .[^.]* ..?*

trashbird1240 · 09-12-2007, 07:59 AM

I'd just like to put in a plug for my favorite shell, the Z Shell,
which you can still program in if you're running as root. One of the
nice things about the file-globbing in Z Shell is that if you know the
situation you want to solve, you can look it up on Google: somebody
has definitely already done it.

Whichever shell I'm using, I deal with the dots by quotation marks:
"."* only gets hidden files for me.

Joel

blackhole54 · 09-12-2007, 08:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by trashbird1240

Whichever shell I'm using, I deal with the dots by quotation marks:
"."* only gets hidden files for me.

I am not familiar with Z shell, but in bash, the quotation marks won't make any difference. You will still pick up . and .. which the OP did not want.