proper way to iterate through contents in a directory

I need to iterate through every file inside a directory. One common way I saw was using the for loop that begins with for file in *; do. However, I realized that it does not include hidden files (files that begin with a “.”). The other obvious way is then do something like

for file in `ls -a`; do

However, iterating over ls is a bad idea because spaces in file names mess everything up. What would be the proper way to iterate through a directory and also get all the hidden files?

Answers:

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Method 1

You just need to create a list of glob matching files, separated by space:

for file in .* *; do echo "$file"; done

Edit

The above one can rewrite in different form using brace expansion

 for file in {.*,*}; do echo "$file"; done

or even shorter: for file in {.,}*; do echo "$file"; done

Adding the path for selected files:

 for file in /path/{..?,.[!.],}*; do echo "$file"; done

Adding path for selected files:

 for file in /path/{.,}*; do echo "$file"; done

If you want to be sophisticated and remove from the list usually unneeded . and .. just change {.,}* to {..?,.[!.],}*.

For completeness it is worth to mention that one can also set dotglob to match dot-files with pure *.

shopt -s dotglob

In zsh one needs additionally set nullglob to prevent the error in case of no-matches:

setopt nullglob

or, alternatively add glob qualifier N to the pattern:

for file in /path/{.,}*(N); do echo "$file"; done

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