Can someone please explain the wildcards in this. How is this recursive? When I put this in my terminal it recursively displayed everything.
ls .[!.]* *
The above command is not recursive, it's just displays the content of the directories
in the current directory (I mean, it's just like ls <directory_name> ).
The pattern .[!.]* matches filenames the begin with a literal dot (.), followed by a character different from a dot,
followed by 0 or more characters of any type. The following * matches any number of non-dot characters characters.
I think it's the same as:
ls .??* * 2>/dev/null
i.e. List the directory without the "." and ".." files which you would get from "ls -a".
If you are not interested in the contents of subdirectories (which is maybe why you mention "recursive"?).
ls -d .??* * 2>/dev/null
Why not just use
ls -a
Because that includes "." and ".." . The idea of the script in post #1 is to show the hidden files (like ".profile") but not the "." and ".." files.
use the uppercase then (if this option is available on your OS) :
ls -A
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I am trying to understand someones shellscript.
Thank you for explaining :).