Listing Hidden Files in Bash

I decided it would be useful to have an alias to display all the hidden files in a directory, but wanted a bit more than just a simple alias to 'ls -Ad .**' as this only allows you to list the current directory. Aliasing 'ls -Ad $*.**' worked, but didn't provide any room for error checking regarding trailing directory slashes. There was also the grep option, but that messes with the nice column formatting ls provides so I scrapped that idea.

In short, I decided to write up a function with a short name that I could use as an alias:

# list only hidden files in the given directory(s)
function lh() {

  # if directories were given
  if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then

    # store current dir so we can come back
    startingPath=`pwd`

    # loop through input dirs
    for i in $*; do

      # only list contents for directories
      if [ -d $i ]; then
        cd $i          # cd to the directory
        echo $i:       # print a header
        ls -Ad .**     # list hidden files
      else
        echo Ignoring directory: $i
      fi

      echo    # blank line for readability

    done

    # cd back to your original directory
    cd $startingPath

  else

    # just list hidden files for current directory
    ls -Ad .**

  fi
}