Issue
I am searching through a Git repository and would like to include the .git folder.
grep does not include this folder if I run
grep -r search *
What would be a grep command to include this folder?
Solution
Please refer to the solution at the end of this post as a better alternative to what you're doing.
You can explicitly include hidden files (a directory is also a file).
grep -r search * .[^.]*
The * will match all files except hidden ones and .[^.]* will match only hidden files without ... However this will fail if there are either no non-hidden files or no hidden files in a given directory. You could of course explicitly add .git instead of .*.
However, if you simply want to search in a given directory, do it like this:
grep -r search .
The . will match the current path, which will include both non-hidden and hidden files.
Answered By - bitmask