How can I grep hidden files?

Question

I am searching through a Git repository and would like to include the .git folder.

grep does not include this folder if I run

grep -r search *

What would be a grep command to include this folder?

Kasten

Answer 1

Please refer to the solution at the end of this post as a better alternative to what you're doing.

You can explicitly include hidden files (a directory is also a file).

grep -r search * .[^.]*

The * will match all files except hidden ones and .[^.]* will match only hidden files without ... However this will fail if there are either no non-hidden files or no hidden files in a given directory. You could of course explicitly add .git instead of .*.

However, if you simply want to search in a given directory, do it like this:

grep -r search .

The . will match the current path, which will include both non-hidden and hidden files.

Norrie

The first approach (grep -r search * .*) worked for me. The second approach (grep -r search .) did not find the string. I found similar results when omitting the "-r" and searching the top-level directory only. I'm using GNU grep 2.6.3. – Quadric

@Alan: That's weird. I use this regularly. Did you try it on the same directory? – Norrie

Yes, I did. By the way, the results are the same whether I use tcsh or bash. It's a Debian 5 64-bit system, for what that's worth. – Quadric

using .* will include the parent directory (because .. matches) – Schumann

What would be the correct command to grep the string "func foobar(" in all *.go files, including files in a hidden subdirectory? – Ornery

Is it safe to generalize about this solution as bahavior may vary between shells? – Melan

for the first version you should add --exclude-dir=.. to avoid searching in the parent folders – Phthalocyanine

Not sure what my particular problem is, but when grepping (or using ack) through .classpath files in a large directory tree, I only get matches for the top level .classpath, even with the -r flag. I have not seen this particular behavior before. Can get it using find exec grep, but odd. – Slippy

Answer 2

I just ran into this problem, and based on @bitmask's answer, here is my simple modification to avoid the problem pointed out by @sehe:

grep -r search_string * .[^.]*

Rafi

i do not get any results using this: sudo grep -r ANDROID_HOME * .[^.]* what am i doing wrong here? – Avoidance

@Avoidance where are you running the search? – Rafi

@Norrie was correct... this was a better answer, but they're now the same. – Rutty

Answer 3

Perhaps you will prefer to combine "grep" with the "find" command for a complete solution like:

find . -exec grep -Hn search {} \;

This command will search inside hidden files or directories for string "search" and list any files with a coincidence with this output format:

File path:Line number:line with coincidence

./foo/bar:42:search line
./foo/.bar:42:search line
./.foo/bar:42:search line
./.foo/.bar:42:search line

Kneepad

Pretty weird, but this is the only way I could recursively grep a large directory tree with a bunch of .classpath files. Using all of the solutions above, grep (and ack for that matter), only return matches against the top-level .classpath file. – Slippy

Answer 4

You may want to use this approach, assuming you're searching the current directory (otherwise replace . with the desired directory):

find . -type f | xargs grep search

or if you just want to search at the top level (which is quicker to test if you're trying these out):

find . -type f -maxdepth 1 | xargs grep search

UPDATE: I modified the examples in response to Scott's comments. I also added "-type f".

Quadric

(1) ~ is the user’s home directory.  The question was not about the user’s home directory, so the answer should not mention ~. (2) In a find command, -name '*' is a no-op (i.e., it serves no purpose). – Lytta

Answer 5

All the other answers are better. This one might be easy to remember:

find . -type f | xargs grep search

It finds only files (including hidden) and greps each file.

Earthiness

This is the best solution for my case – Combo

Answer 6

To search within ONLY all hidden files and directories from your current location:

find . -name ".*" -exec grep -rs search {} \;

ONLY all hidden files:

find . -name ".*" -type f -exec grep -s search {} \;

ONLY all hidden directories:

find . -name ".*" -type d -exec grep -rs search {} \;

Simmonds

Answer 7

In addition to Tyler's suggestion, Here is the command to grep all files and folders recursively including hidden files

find . -name "*.*" -exec grep -li 'search' {} \;

Tennies

this answer would be improved by using -name "*" -type f instead, if you only want to search inside files. The original suggestion will miss any files that do not have a type extension. This change will still recurse into hidden directories, but additionally skip running grep against directory objects. – Underclothes

Answer 8

To find only within a certain folder you can use:

ls -al | grep " \."

It is a very simple command to list and pipe to grep.

Embowed

Answer 9

To search hidden files from the current folder non-recursively

find . -maxdepth 1 -name '.*' -type f -exec grep -ls 'search text' {} \;

To search hidden files from the current folder recursively

find . -name '.*' -type f -exec grep -ls 'search text' {} \;

Ballot

Answer 10

You can also search for specific types of hidden files like so for hidden directory files:

grep -r --include=*.directory "search-string"

This may work better than some of the other options. The other options that worked can be too slow.

Belinda

Just like described above. You need to cd into the directory first and read the part "specific types of hidden files". – Belinda

I do not understand what --include=*.directory is supposed to do - it's not like all my directories end in .directory? – Nereidanereids

No: those are hidden files in directories in Linux. Open a folder (which has an image set as a folder-icon for example) with your file explorer and show hidden files. There usually is a ".directory" file. – Belinda

why the star then? – Nereidanereids

also, the question is specifically about .git, or including hidden directories in general – Nereidanereids