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Views: 2,479 Votes: 3 ✅ Solution
Tags: command-line ls hidden-files
Link: 🔍 See Original Answer on Ask Ubuntu ⧉ 🔗

URL: https://askubuntu.com/q/1244495
Title: How can I exclude . and .. when listing hidden items?
ID: /2020/05/28/How-can-I-exclude-.-and-/How-can-I-exclude-.-and-..-when-listing-hidden-items_
Created: May 28, 2020    Edited:  May 28, 2020
Upload: April 21, 2025    Layout:  post
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From the second answer in:

How to show only hidden files in Terminal?

This works on my machine (I’m not using SSH like the OP though):

ls -d .!(|.)

If there are no hidden files or directories you will get an error message:

$ ls -d .!(|.)
ls: cannot access '.!(|.)': No such file or directory

The error message occurs on directories with no hidden files because . and .. are excluded.

`shopt` consideration

From comments:

ls -d .[!.]* works without extglob