finding contents of hidden unix files

I've never really gotten the hang of which environment file contains what when fixing environment variables on a unix system. Well, I do know, I just spend way too much time doing this stuff, because there's always a lot of places I miss.

So while I normally can simply grep for the contents of a file, grepping for the contents of a hidden file, however, is slightly more tricky. Selecting .* doen't really seem to cut it with the find or grep commands. Luckily I found a way to cheat it.....

grep 'string' ./.*

This cheats grep into searching the local directory . for files of type .*
So now I can just grep for my variablename and find all occurances in the profile files without actually having to think about it.....