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 ``` grep -r search * ``` What would be a grep command to include this folder?

Accepted Answer

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 without `..`. 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.

How can I grep hidden files?

Solution

Problem