Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
Hidden files. What is up with them? I noticed these files with tildes after them. So I found out they were backups of files made in text editors. Then I found that they were hidden. But not all of them were hidden. Think they're worth having around or should I shut off the area in preferences (in the text editors) where they are checked?
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On Unix systems, and Linux systems whose design derives from Unix, files whose name begins with a . are not shown in a directory listing. To see them, you must do "ls -a".
Many things create hidden files. They are where config files for programs you use are normally kept. The program will have a master config file, usually in the /etc hierarchy, and local ones in the user's home directories, which will override the settings in the global file if they exist. For instance, your shell will have a .profile or a .login file.
Text editors are likely to create journal or backup copy files as hidden, because the odds are you don't want to see them cluttering up a directory display. (They are easy enough to see if you want to.)
Whether they are worth keeping is a judgement call. Which editors do you have installed? How likely are you to need to revert to a backup of what you were editing? The editor may have a configuration setting that will let you turn off keeping a backup if you don't need them. The amount of space they take is unlikely to be a concern, so the question is "Do you need the backups?" Since you don't by default see the backup files unless you did something like alias ls to ls -a in your shell, you probably don't care that hard that they exist.
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Dennis