What does ls -al .* command return?

Question

Does it show hidden file names inside all directories? Or just the current directory (including any directory inside it)? I cannot understand why ls -ld .* returns different results (it shows hidden files and directories ONLY in current directory, not showing files inside any other directory inside it)? Also What does -d do alone (ls -d)?

Answer 1

ls -al .* shows the contents of all directories in the current directory whose names begin with . (ie all those matching the shell glob .*)

In Bash, the .* glob resolves to . and .. as well. Since . represents the current directory, and .. the parent directory, the contents of both of these directories, including any hidden files and directories, are shown too.¹

.* also catches hidden files in the current directory, but they are listed anyway as contents of .

As explained in What does `ls --directory` stand for? the -d flag causes the directories themselves to be displayed, instead of their contents.

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¹_{this is also the case in dash, which is the shell symlinked to sh in Ubuntu. However, other shells, including zsh and mksh, behave more intuitively and don't include . and .. when expanding .*. It is also worth noting that, while most commands will operate on .. and . when they are included in a .* glob (including chmod and chown - you can really mess up your system with those), the rm command will helpfully fail by design to do so.}

Answer 2

It will list down all the files + directories including hidden files/directories in the current directory along with the files starting with . in their names.

ls means listing of the directories along with files in the current directory.
a denotes all the files in the directory, both hidden and not.
l denotes the long listing of information about files+directory with their permissions and last updated time.
.* denotes all the hidden files in the current directory starting with . in their name.

Answer 3

It will return all the hidden files, or files starting with . in that directory. To view all files (including hidden) in a directory, use ls -al