On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 17:35:53 +1300, Shams <shams@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Is it the kernel or the shell and other user land program eg. bash, > ls, rm responsible for hiding the dotted files? ls hides the files when it is asked to list a directory. Use the -a option to override this. You can even use an alias so that when you type in an ls command the -a option is applied without additional typing. Shell expansion of * is controlled by your shell. I believe that all of the available shells do things this way. Be very careful using .* as it matches .. . Doing something like rm -r * .* to empty the current directory will actually delete everthing under the parent directory.