Linux show hidden directories

An Easy Way to Hide Files and Directories in Linux

Do you occasionally share your Linux desktop machine with family members, friends or perhaps with colleagues at your workplace, then you have a reason to hide certain private files as well as folders or directories. The question is how can you do this?

In this tutorial, we will explain an easy and effective way to hide files and directories and view hidden files/directories in Linux from the terminal and GUI.

As we’ll see below, hiding files and directories in Linux is so simple.

How to Hide Files and Directories in Linux

To hide a file or directory from the terminal, simply append a dot . at the start of its name as follows using the mv command.

Hide File in Linux Terminal

Using GUI method, the same idea applies here, just rename the file by adding a . at the start of its name as shown below.

Hide File in Linux Using File Manager

Once you have renamed it, the file will still be seen, move out of the directory and open it again, it will be hidden thereafter.

How to View Hide Files and Directories in Linux

To view hidden files, run the ls command with the -a flag which enables viewing of all files in a directory or -al flag for long listing.

View Hidden Files in Linux Terminal

From a GUI file manager, go to View and check the option Show Hidden Files to view hidden files or directories.

View Hidden File Using File Manager

How to Compress Files and Directories with a Password

In order to add a little security to your hidden files, you can compress them with a password and then hide them from a GUI file manager as follows.

Select the file or directory and right click on it, then choose Compress from the menu list, after seeing the compression preferences interface, click on “Other options” to get the password option as shown in the screenshot below.

Once you have set the password, click on Create.

Compress Files with Password in Linux

From now on, each time anyone wants to open the file, they’ll be asked to provide the password created above.

Enter Password to View Files

Now you can hide the file by renaming it with a . as we explained before.

That’s it for now! In this tutorial, we described how to easily and effectively hide files and directories and view hidden files/directories in Linux from the terminal and GUI file manager. Make use of the feedback form below to share any thoughts with us.

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Linux show hidden files and folders with simple commands

Table of Contents

In this article we will cover below topics

• Create hidden files and folders/directories
• Linux show hidden files and folders/directories
• Linux find hidden files and folder/directories
• Check size of hidden files and folder/directories

The commands from this article to view hidden files and folders can be used across any Linux platform such as Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, RHEL, CentOS, SuSE etc or any Unix node such as HP-UX, Solaris, etc.

I am using RHEL/CentOS 8 node installed on Oracle VirtualBox . Please do let me know via comment section if you face any issues following the commands from this article to view hidden files or folders in Linux or Unix.

Create hidden Files

To create hidden files you just need to make sure the filename starts with dot character ( . ). In Linux any filename which starts with dot ( . ) character is considered as hidden file. For example here I create a normal file using touch command

To list the file, as you see since the filename does not starts with dot ( . ) character, it is not hidden

Next we rename the file and make it .hidden_file starting with (.)

Next if you try to list the available files, we don’t see hidden_file anymore.

Check alias on this node

As you see there is an alias for ls command so by default it is configured to hidden files and folders. To remove this temporarily execute » unlias ls «

Next show hidden files and folders using ls , now this works as expected as we don’t see hidden folders or files.

This is temporary fix only for the current session, you need to check where this setting is configured for alias , it may be /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc some other system file based on your distribution.

Similarly to create hidden files you can just put a ( . ) infront of the filename, for example to create hidden files with filename » my_file «:

Create hidden folder or directory

The steps to create hidden folder or directory in Linux or Unix is similar to create hidden files. We just need to make sure the folder name starts with dot ( . ) character.

Now list the available files in current directory, as expected we don’t see any directory/folder since the folder is hidden. So we were able to create hidden folder here.

Linux show hidden files and folders with ‘ls’ command

• In this example we will use ls command in Linux show hidden files and folders.
• We can use ls command with » -a » to show all files including hidden files and folder.
• With -a «we do not ignore entries starting with . » that means also Linux show hidden files and folders.
• For example to show hidden files and folders which we created in above steps, navigate to your directory and execute ls -a
• We have also used -l to give us a long list so we use ls -al to show all files under test directory in long list format

As you see we were able to show hidden folders and files with » ls -a » which we had created earlier in this article.

Linux show hidden files and folders with ‘find’ command

Now with ls command we were able to show hidden files in one directory or may be multiple directories in Linux and Unix. But with ls it is little tricky to show hidden folders and files across all partitions. Here we can find hidden files using find command in Linux or Unix.

Now from our chapter » create hidden files » and » create hidden directory «, we know that hidden files start with dot ( . ) character. So we can use this trick with find command to find hidden files.

For example to find hidden files use -type f under /etc/ directory we can use below command

Here we are only search of files using » -type f » and any filename starting with dot ( . )

With Linux show hidden files and folders we can use the same command with -type d to find hidden folders under /usr

Here we could not have used » ls -a » to show hidden files in all these directories without using extra commands, so find is a better alternative to find hidden folder and files in Linux or Unix.

Check size of hidden files and folders

Now once you find hidden files or folders, you may also wish to check size of hidden files or folders.

For example we will find hidden files under our

So we have two hidden files, we can use ls with -Sh to check size of hidden files but it again has it’s own challenges.

• -S means sort by file size
• -h means print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

We use ls -lSha to show and check size of hidden file but as you see ls could only identify .hidden_file in the current folder but missed .hidden_file_2 available inside .hidden_directory

We will use du command to check size of hidden files in Linux or Unix. du command is used to estimate file space usage. We must combine du with find commands to first we find hidden files and folders and then we check size of hidden files using du command

For example to check size of hidden files under /test folder

Similarly to check size of hidden files under /tmp folder

Lastly I hope the steps from this article to Linux show hidden files and folders, create hidden files, create hidden folder and find hidden files and folders in Linux and Unix was helpful. So, let me know your suggestions and feedback using the comment section.

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Hide Folders and Show Hidden Files in Ubuntu Linux [Beginner Trick]

Last updated October 29, 2020 By Abhishek Prakash 16 Comments

Your are probably familiar with the concept of “hiding” a folder or file in Windows. Hiding a folder or file just “removes” the folder from the normal view and then you can choose to display “hidden files” to see it.

So how do you see the hidden files in Linux then? Let me show you that.

Show hidden files in Ubuntu & other Linux distributions

If you are in a terminal, you can use the ls command to display the all the files, including the hidden ones:

You can recognize the hidden files and folders with the dot (.) before their names.

If you use desktop Linux, you can still see hidden files easily. Let’s see how.

Keyboard Shortcut in GUI

If you are in the file manager, you can use the Ctrl+H keyboard shortcut in Ubuntu and I presume other distributions to display all the files including the hidden ones.

Pressing Ctrl+H again will hide the files.

If you are not a fan of keyboard shortcuts, you can use the file manager GUI to display the hidden folders and files.

To see a hidden file or hidden folder in Ubuntu, go to the file manager (default is Nautilus). File Manager is Ubuntu’s counter part of Windows Explorer.

Now go to the top menu->Show hidden files:

How to hide files or folders in Ubuntu

Now that you have learned to see hidden files in Ubuntu, let’s now see how you can hide a folder or files.

Unfortunately/interestingly, there is no similar way as in Windows to hide a folder. In Windows, you right click on a file and choose the option of making it hidden. But this option is not available in Ubuntu.

So, how can you hide a folder in Ubuntu then? Very simple! Using the Linux property of hiding a file/folder. In Linux, if a file name starts with . (dot), it is considered as a hidden file.

Now if you want to hide a file or folder, lets say MyFolder, just rename it to .MyFolder and it will be taken as a hidden file or folder.

If you are using Linux desktop, just right click and choose the rename option and add the dot before the name.

Bonus Tip: Hiding multiple files and folders without renaming all of them (valid for GUI only)

This is a neat little trick that will let you hide several files and folders from the normal view in your desktop Linux’s file manager.

Traditionally, if you create a .hidden file and add the name of the folders in this file, those folders will be hidden from normal view when you close your file manager and open it again.

Keep in mind that this trick works with only the current directory you are in. It won’t work for nested directories. You can create the .hidden file in any directory to hide files and folders in it.

This was about hiding files in Linux. There are separate methods for locking a folder in Linux. I hope you like this little bit of Linux knowledge.

Like what you read? Please share it with others.

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Linux / Unix – Find And List All Hidden Files Recursively

I am a new Unix system shell user. I need to find and list all hidden files including directories on a Linux or Unix-like system. How can I recursively list all hidden files and directories? How do I save result in a text file?

You need to use the find command to list all hidden files recursively on a Linux or Unix like systems.You can also use the ls command to list hidden files.

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	None
Est. reading time	2m

What is a hidden file in Linux or Unix?

In the Unix and Linux based system, a hidden file is nothing but file name that starts with a “.” (period). You can not see hidden files with the ls command.

View hidden files with the ls command

You can pass the -a options to the ls command to see hidden file:
ls -a
OR
ls -al
OR
ls -al | more
Sample outputs:

Fig.01: Use ls command to see hidden files

Where ls options are as follows:

• -l : Use a long listing format.
• -d : Show directories themselves, not their contents.
• .[!.]?* OR .?* : Force ls to show only hidden files.

Recursively list all hidden files and directories on Linux/Unix

The basic syntax is as follows for the find command:
find /dir/to/search/ -name «.*» -print
OR
find /dir/to/search/ -name «.*» -ls
Search only hidden files:
find /dir/to/search/ -type f -iname «.*» -ls
Search only hidden directories:
find /dir/to/search/ -type d -iname «.*» -ls
Use find command as follows:
find /dir/to/search -path ‘*/.*’ -print
find /dir/to/search -path ‘*/.*’ -ls
In this example, search $HOME for all hidden files and dirs:
find $HOME -name «.*» -ls
Sample outputs:

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