How to delete all hidden files and directories using Bash?

Question

The obvious solution produces an exit code of 1:

bash$ rm -rf .*
rm: cannot remove directory `.'
rm: cannot remove directory `..'
bash$ echo $?
1

One possible solution will skip the "." and ".." directories but will only delete files whose names are longer than 3 characters:

bash$ rm -f .??*

Answer 1

rm -rf .[^.] .??*

Should catch all cases. The .??* will only match 3+ character filenames (as explained in previous answer), the .[^.] will catch any two character entries (other than ..).

Answer 2

Just so you know, .. and . are not files. They are references to directories. . (just a single dot) is the current directory, and .. (two dots) is a link to the directory one level up. For example, if cd /home/user, . is equal to /home/user and .. is /home/

In other words, you can't delete the . and ..(.?)

Answer 3

best way probably is:

• find . -iname .* -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec rm {} \;

change rm to ls -l if you just want to see what would be deleted, to verbose the output u may want to add -v option to rm

• -type f options tells find command to look only for files (omit dirs, links etc)
• -maxdepth 1 tells find not to go down to subdirectories

ps. don't forget about ending '\;'