Anton, et al -- ...and then Anton Aylward said... % % Also % ls -lR /.[a-zA-Z0-0]* I always preferred .??* myself, although that does miss fun things like . # trailing space .a ._ and so on so you still have to glance or come up with every char EXCEPT a dot. % % Yes, I know about "[:alnum:]" but I've used the full expression here % to make the point. Hmmmm ... Do char classes work for ls for you? Not for me on Leap 15.2: diskfarm:/tmp/X # ls -la total 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 65 Mar 15 22:31 . -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 15 22:27 '. ' drwxrwxrwt 14 root root 4096 Mar 15 22:30 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 15 22:27 .abc -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 15 22:27 .x -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 15 22:31 B -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 15 22:31 a -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 15 22:31 c diskfarm:/tmp/X # ls -la .[:alnum:]* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 15 22:27 .abc diskfarm:/tmp/X # ls -la .[:alnum:] ls: cannot access '.[:alnum:]': No such file or directory diskfarm:/tmp/X # Note that .abc worked because 'a' is one of the characters :-) HTH & HAND :-D -- David T-G See http://justpickone.org/davidtg/email/ See http://justpickone.org/davidtg/tofu.txt