Question

There are often times that I want to execute a command on all files (including hidden files) in a directory. When I try using

chmod g+w * .*

it changes the permissions on all the files I want (in the directory) and all the files in the parent directory (that I want left alone).

Is there a wildcard that does the right thing or do I need to start using find?

Answer 1

You will need two glob patterns to cover all the potential “dot files”: .[^.]* and ..?*.

The first matches all directory entries with two or more characters where the first character is a dot and the second character is not a dot. The second picks up entries with three or more characters that start with .. (this excludes .. because it only has two characters and starts with a ., but includes (unlikely) entries like ..foo).

chmod g+w .[^.]* ..?*

This should work well in most all shells and is suitable for scripts.

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For regular interactive use, the patterns may be too difficult to remember. For those cases, your shell might have a more convenient way to skip . and ...
zsh always excludes . and .. from patterns like .*.
With bash, you have to use the GLOBIGNORE shell variable.

# bash
GLOBIGNORE=.:..
echo .*

You might consider setting GLOBIGNORE in one of your bash customization files (e.g. .bash_profile/.bash_login or .bashrc).
Beware, however, becoming accustomed to this customization if you often use other environments.
If you run a command like chmod g+w .* in an environment that is missing your customization, then you will unexpectedly end up including . and .. in your command.

Additionally, you can configure the shells to include “dot files” in patterns that do not start with an explicit dot (e.g. *).

# zsh
setopt glob_dots

# bash
shopt -s dotglob


# show all files, even “dot files”
echo *