How to delete all files in a current directory starting with a dot?

When you want to delete all dot files, the convention is to use this command:

rm .??*

This will delete all files starting with a dot containing at least two other characters, thus leaving . and .. intact. Granted, it will also miss file names with only one letter after the dot, but these should be rare.

.* matches all files whose name starts with .. Every directory contains a file called . which refers to the directory itself, and a file called .. which refers to the parent directory. .* includes those files.

Fortunately for you, attempting to remove . or .. fails, so you get a harmless error.

In zsh, .* does not match . or ... In bash, you can set

GLOBIGNORE='.:..:*/.:*/..'

and then * will match all files, including dot files, but excluding . and ...

Alternatively, you can use a wildcard pattern that explicitly excludes . and ..:

rm -rf .[!.]* ..?*

or

rm -rf .[!.] .??*

Alternatively, use find.

find . -mindepth 1 -delete

find /path/to/dir -type f -name ".*" -delete