directoryhidden-fileshome-directory
I discovered some mysterious directories in my home.
Every one has dot before name.
They can't be seen from file explorer or even terminal, for example I'm using Eclipse "open file" for seeing them.
They are called for example ".arduino", ".mozilla", ".local"…
My question is: What are they? Are they bad? Why are they messing my home? Is it like apps data?
Nautilus (Update: This should also work with Thunar now) will hide any file or folder that is listed in the file .hidden located in the same directory.
There are two ways to hide a folder in Nautilus:
Save the following code in a new file in your home folder. Name it Hide.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import commands
from os.path import join
files = commands.getoutput("echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS")
cwd = commands.getoutput("echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_CURRENT_URI")
cwd = cwd[7:]
for f in files.split(" /"):
f = f.split("/")[-1]
commands.getoutput("echo "+f+" >> "+join(cwd, ".hidden"))
Run the following command to install the script:
cp Hide ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/ && chmod u+x ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/Hide
In Nautilus, select one or more files/folders and right click. Select Hide from the Scripts menu:
Reload the current location ( F5 ) and the selected files/folders will be hidden.
Say you want to hide a folder called "Rick Astley's Greatest Hits", just run the following command:
echo "Rick Astley's Greatest Hits" >> .hidden
As far as I know there is no issues with naming folders and files with a single or multiple dots.
Ubuntu generally does not use the dot and three characters (such as .txt) to identify the file type. So this has no special meaning in the Ubuntu context. This is useful when sharing files with Windows. Ubuntu uses Magic Numbers in the first few bytes of the file to identify the file type. However, Nautilus. ignores the magic numbers if the dot and three characters extension is available to identify the file type. This setting can be changed. See Force nautilus to ignore extensions
In Ubuntu, starting a file or folder names with a dot, such as .experiment_L0.5, makes the file or folder hidden. You can toggle the display of hidden files by pressing Ctrl+H in Nautilus. In Windows a file name starting with a . is not hidden. So if you transfer a hidden file named .experiment_L0.5 into a Windows system it will be plainly visible.
In Ubuntu a file name can end with a dot as it has no special meaning placed at the end. However, in Windows a dot separates the file name and extension, and a file name ending with a dot but no extension is not allowed. When I tried to create such a file in Windows I got a file with just the name, no dot, no extension.
Reference: Wiki on Filenames
Hope this helps.
Best Answer
Files with a dot at the beginning of the name are hidden by default. In Nautilus (Ubuntu's default file manager) you can make them visible with Ctrl+H. For the
lscommand, add the switch-ato it, which lists all files.These files are either there from the beginning (like
.localor.config) or are created by a program to store configuration etc.As an example, PlayOnLinux stores its virtual drives in
~/.PlayOnLinux. Java will create the.javadirectory, and Firefox and Thunderbird use the.mozilladirectory. There are also files, not only directories. E.g..bash_historycontains the command history of your terminal shell.So don't worry about these files. As a "normal" user, who doesn't mess with his systems config, you'll most likelynever even need to take a look into these files and directories.