How to show only hidden files in Terminal?

The command :

ls -ld .?* 

Will only list hidden files .

Explain :

 -l     use a long listing format

 -d, --directory
              list  directory entries instead of contents, and do not derefer‐
              ence symbolic links

.?* will only state hidden files 

ls -d .!(|.)

Does exactly what OP is looking for .

If you just want the files in your current directory (no recursion), you could do

echo .[^.]*

That will print the names of all files whose name starts with a . and is followed by one or more non-dot characters. Note that this will fail for files whose name starts with consecutive dots, so for example ....foo will not be shown.

You could also use find:

find -mindepth 1 -prune -name '.*'

The -mindepth ensures we don't match . and the -prune means that find won't descend into subdirectories.

ls -ad .*

works for me in Bash.

Using find and awk,

find . -type f | awk -F"/" '$NF ~ /^\..*$/ {print $NF}'

Explanation:

find . -type f --> List all the files in the current directory along with it's path like,

./foo.html
./bar.html
./.foo1

awk -F"/" '$NF ~ /^\..*$/ {print $NF}'

/ as field separator awk checks for the last field staring with a dot or not. If it starts with a dot, then it prints the last field of that corresponding line.

find is usually a better option for complicated searches than using name globbing.

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name '.*'

or

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name '.*' -o -name '*~'

find . searches current directory

-mindepth 1 excludes . and .. from the list

-maxdepth 1 limits the search to the current directory

-name '.*' find file names that start with a dot

-o or

-name '*~' find file names that end with a tilde (usually, these are backup files from text editing programs)

However, this and all of the other answers miss files that are in the current directory's .hidden file. If you are writing a script, then these lines will read the .hidden file and display the file names of those that exist.

if [[ -f .hidden]] # if '.hidden' exists and is a file
then
    while read filename # read file name from line
    do
        if [[ -e "$filename" ]] # if the read file name exists
        then
            echo "$filename" # print it
        fi
    done < .hidden # read from .hidden file
fi

I think that you can do it with following command.

ls -a | grep "^\." | grep -v "^\.$" | grep -v "^\..$"

ls -a command you entered, that shows all files and directories in current working directory.

grep "^\." command I appended, that filters output to shows only hidden files(It's name starts with ".").

grep -v "^\.$" | grep -v "^\..$" command I appended, that filters output to exclude ., ..(They are current and parent directory).

If some filenames can have more than a line with "\n", above example could be incorrect.

So I suggest following command to solve it issue.

find -maxdepth 1 -name ".[!.]*"

Approach 1: ls -d .{[!.],.?}*

Explain: I want to exclude . and .. but include file such as ..i_am_also_a_hidden_file.txt

1. ls -d .* undesirably shows . and ..
2. ls -d .?* (the current accepted answer) undesirably shows ..
3. ls -d .[!.]* undesirably will not show ..i_am_also_a_hidden_file.txt
4. ls -d .{[!.],.?}* is the answer

Approach 2: ls -A | grep "\\."

I personally like this way better

What else you could have done, is ls .?* Or ls .!(|) that will show you everything in the current dir hidden files/dirs on the top and other files/dirs below

e.g: from my terminal

$ ls .?*       
.bash_history    .dmrc        .macromedia   .weather
.bash_logout     .gksu.lock   .profile      .wgetrc
.bash_profile    .bashrc.save .ICEauthority .toprc           .Xauthority
.bashrc          .lastdir     .viminfo      .xsession-errors
.bashrc~         .dircolors   .lynxrc       .vimrc           .xsession-errors.old

..:
Baron

.adobe:
Flash_Player

.aptitude:
cache  config

.cache:
compizconfig-1                              rhythmbox
dconf                                       shotwell

Now notice in the above results, it shows you every file/dir with its subdir and any hidden files right below.

[1:0:248][ebaron@37signals:pts/4][~/Desktop]
$ ls .!(|)
.bash_aliases  .bashrc1  .bashrc1~

..:
askapache-bash-profile.txt  examples.desktop             Public           top-1m.csv
backups             Firefox_wallpaper.png        PycharmProjects          top-1m.csv.zip
Desktop             java_error_in_PYCHARM_17581.log  Shotwell Import Log.txt  topsites.txt
Documents           Music                Templates            Videos
Downloads           Pictures                 texput.log           vmware

Sorry, I cannot comment. to explain the difference here between ls .?* and @cioby23 answer ls -d .[!.]* .??* And why it is actually printing hidden files twice is because literally you're asking twice .??*, .?*, .[!.]* they're the same thing, so adding any of them with different command characters will print twice.

With bash, setting the GLOBIGNORE special variable is some non-empty value is enough to make it ignore . and .. when expanding globs. From the Bash docs:

The GLOBIGNORE shell variable may be used to restrict the set of filenames matching a pattern. If GLOBIGNORE is set, each matching filename that also matches one of the patterns in GLOBIGNORE is removed from the list of matches. If the nocaseglob option is set, the matching against the patterns in GLOBIGNORE is performed without regard to case. The filenames . and .. are always ignored when GLOBIGNORE is set and not null. However, setting GLOBIGNORE to a non-null value has the effect of enabling the dotglob shell option, so all other filenames beginning with a ‘.’ will match.

If we set it to .:.., both . and .. will be ignored. Since setting it to anything non-null will also get this behaviour, we might as well set it to just .

So:

GLOBIGNORE=.
ls -d .*