How to show or see all the hidden files in Linux?

July 12, 2021 - 1 min read

To show or see all the hidden files in a directory, you can use the ls command followed by the -a flag in the directory in Linux.

For example, to see all the hidden files in the myFiles directory, you can use the ls -a command like this,

# Show all files including
# hidden files in a directory
ls -a

This will show all the hidden files in the myFiles directory.

How do I know which files are hidden files?

  • In most Linux distributions, the hidden files start with a . symbol followed by the name of that file.
  • To hide a file called hello.txt, we can add a . (dot symbol) to the start of the filename, so its name will now appear as .hello.txt.

See the above code live in repl.it.

That's all 😃!

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