Unix and Unix-like Environments
In Unix-like operating systems a file or directory that starts with a period/full stop character (for example: /home/user/.config) is to be treated as hidden, that is the ls command does not display them. Use ls with the flag -a (ls -a) to include them. Midnight Commander shows them by default. The Nautilus file manager also excludes from the display filenames contained in .hidden in each directory (the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-h enables the display of hidden files).
Wildcards on the shell command line will not match dotfiles unless they start with an explicit '.' .
The notion that filenames preceded by a '.' should be hidden is the result of a software bug in the early days of Unix. When the special '.' and '..' directory entries were added to the filesystem, it was decided that the ls command should not display them. However, the ls program was mistakenly written to exclude any file whose name started with a '.', rather than only files named '.' or '..'.
Read more about this topic: Hidden File And Hidden Directory
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