If you are not familiar with the find command, check out our Getting Started article.

Let's say /tmp/example contains both hidden and non-hidden files.

/tmp/example/foo.txt
/tmp/example/.bar.txt
/tmp/example/.hidden_directory

The following command can be used to return both hidden and non-hidden files and directories.

find /tmp/example -name "*"

The following should be returned.

/tmp/example
/tmp/example/foo.txt
/tmp/example/.bar.txt
/tmp/example/.hidden_directory

The following command can be used to only return the hidden files and directories.

find /tmp/example -name ".*"

The following should be returned.

/tmp/example/.bar.txt
/tmp/example/.hidden_directory

And here is how you would exclude hidden files and directories.

find /tmp/example -not -name ".*"

The following should be returned.

/tmp/example
/tmp/example/foo.txt