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ls command with wild card can't return filenames starting with dot

 
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# 1  
Old 07-24-2012
ls command with wild card can't return filenames starting with dot
I came across the following behaviour in Solaris 10 (x86-64bit) and RHEL 5.6 (Tikanga)

-a option in ls command is supposed to list all files starting with a dot.

From the man page of ls
Code:
 -a, --all
              do not ignore entries starting with .

Code:
$ touch .mytestfile
$ vi .mytestfile
$ cat .mytestfile
HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOO WORLD...................

##### It works when the full file is specified
Code:
$ ls -alrt .mytestfile
-rw-r----- 1 oracle oinstall 44 Jul 24 08:12 .mytestfile

###### It works when I include the dot with wild card
Code:
$ ls -alrt .my*
-rw-r----- 1 oracle oinstall 44 Jul 24 08:12 .mytestfile

### But it doesn't work for the following scenarios.


# Despite having the -a option to show the hidden files, the following ls commands don't return this file

Code:
$ ls -alrt *test*
ls: *test*: No such file or directory

$ ls -alrt *file*
ls: *file*: No such file or directory

$ ls -alrt *mytest*
ls: *mytest*: No such file or directory

Any idea why ?
# 2  
Old 07-24-2012
Star (*) that you are using here is "shell expansion" character. It means that shell is substituting it for filenames that are then passed to ls. ls never "sees" the star character, so changing any options for ls won't have any effect. I don't know if there is any way to modify shell's behaviour to include hidden (dot) files when using shell expansion character.
This User Gave Thanks to bartus11 For This Post:
kraljic
# 3  
Old 07-24-2012
In linux using bash you can switch off globbing of the leading dots with the builtin shopt (shell option) dotglob:

Code:
$ ls -l *test*              
-rwx------ 1 root root 76 Jul 19 12:43 test
$ shopt -s dotglob               
$ ls -l *test*              
-rwx------ 1 root root 76 Jul 19 12:43 test
-rwx------ 1 root root 75 Jul 19 12:42 .test

 
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