[ralph]

What do you think is doing the expansion of the asterisk? It's the shell, not grep, and is called globbing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globbing

The reason there are files that start with a dot is that ls(1) and globs starting with an asterisk ignore them by default. ls needs -a (all) to show them. Some shells, but not bash, provide a globbing syntax for the recursive expansion you think you require here.

But if, as normal, you want to grep recursively down from the current directory then that's what you should specify; just pass grep one path to search, dot, the current directory.

    grep -r foo .

This is very basic knowledge of the Unix command line for a programmer and I highly recommend the classic text _The Unix Programming Environment_ by Kernighan and Pike to learn the philosophy behind Unix. It has nothing on window systems, ssh, etc., nor should it have as that's modern-day noise that hides the essence. It and Kernighan and Ritchie's _The C Programming Language_ were the key books every starting-out Unix programmer read. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/013937681X/mqq-20