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

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. 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.