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

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.

Answer 2

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 {} \;

Answer 3

To prevent matching . and .. which are not hidden files, you can use grep with ls -A like in this example:

ls -A | grep "^\."

^\. states that the first character must be .

The -A or --almost-all option excludes the results . and .. so that only hidden files and directories are matched.

Answer 4

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.