Bash for loop with wildcards and hidden files

Question

Just witting a simple shell script and little confused:

Here is my script:

% for f in $FILES; do echo \"Processing $f file..\"; done

<

Answer 1

FILES=".bash*" works because the hidden files name begin with a .

FILES="bash*" doesn't work because the hidden files name begin with a . not a b

FILES="*bash*" doesn't work because the * wildcard at the beginning of a string omits hidden files.

Answer 2

The default globbing in bash does not include filenames starting with a . (aka hidden files).

You can change that with

shopt -s dotglob

$ ls -a
.  ..  .a  .b  .c  d  e  f
$ ls *
d  e  f
$ shopt -s dotglob
$ ls *
.a  .b  .c  d  e  f
$ 

To disable it again, run shopt -u dotglob.

Answer 3

If you want hidden and non hidden, set dotglob (bash)

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s dotglob
for file in *
do
 echo "$file"
done

Answer 4

Yes, the . at the front is special, and normally won't be matched by a * wildcard, as documented in the bash man page (and common to most Unix shells):

When a pattern is used for pathname expansion, the character “.” at the start of a name or immediately following a slash must be matched explicitly, unless the shell option dotglob is set. When matching a pathname, the slash character must always be matched explicitly. In other cases, the “.” character is not treated specially.