By: slava_dp

slava_dp — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:51:24 +0000

I’ve been looking for a firm solution to the dotfile selection problem for a while.
ls .??* fails on a file named .a
ls .[^.]* fails on a file named ..file
ls -A | egrep ‘^\.’ will fail if a file name contains a linebreak or other funky characters (yes it can).

The only proper solution (as per #bash@freenode guys) is this:
set +o histexpand #disables special “!” interpretation
shopt -s extglob #enables extended bash globs
echo .!(|.) #gives you all your dotfiles, excluding “.” and “..”, and without mangling anything.

By: Zordrak

Zordrak — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:17:01 +0000

@mosk0bit Thanks. Didn't know about that one.

By: mosk0bit

mosk0bit — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:28:02 +0000

Perhaps, a simpler way is:

tar cvJf filename.tar.xz .??*

Comments on: Tarring up JUST the dotfiles

By: slava_dp

By: Zordrak

By: mosk0bit