Curious Sunday Morning Linux File System Question ??

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 17:35:53 +1300,
  Shams <shams at orcon.net.nz> 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.