Take the tour ×  I was wondering what the difference between
these two were:     It's really difficult to ask this on Google
since I didn't know how to explain the . when I didn't even know
what to call it. But can someone describe the difference between
including the dot and excluding it?  share|improve this question
add comment  migrated from programmers.stackexchange.com Sep 30
'11 at 15:15   5 Answers  up vote 2 down vote accepted  Under
unix-like systems, all directories contain two entries, . and
.., which stand for the directory itself and its parent
respectively. These entries are not interesting most of the
time, so ls hides them, and shell wildcards like * don't include
them. More generally, ls and wildcards hide all files whose name
begins with a .; this is a simple way to exclude . and .. and
allow users to hide other files from listings. Other than being
excluded from listings, there's nothing special about these
files.  Unix stores per-user configuration files in the user's
home directory. If al