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A friend of mine is showing me how to use the shell (on my mac) and I used ls -a to look at all of the files in my home directory and there are a few that I'm wondering if they're garbage.
The ones that seem non-native to the computer (I'm running Mountain Lion) .cups .drjava .nbprofiler .netbeans .profile
I googled netbeans (and "cups" unsuccessfully) and it seems like netbeans is an IDE, but I never installed it and it's not on my computer. I'm just curious if some of these files are garbage that piggybacked here on other downloads. Thanks for any knowledge you guys might have of this!
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Files whose names begin with ``. '' (dot) are hidden from view in a normal directory listing. Certain programs, such as mail and your shell, create hidden files to avoid cluttering your home directory with unnecessary files.
User settings and app configurations are often saved as hidden files, for example. Programs need these files to run, but users don't really need access to them. Hidden file caches are common as well, temporary stores of data to speed up software operations.
A hidden file is a file which has the hidden attribute turned on so that it is not visible to users when exploring or listing files. Hidden files are used for storage of user preferences or for preservation of the state of utilities. They are created frequently by various system or application utilities.
Click Start and then My Computer. Click Tools and then Folder Options. In the Folder Options window, click the View tab. On the View tab, under Advanced Settings, select Don't show hidden files, folders and drives.
All of the files that you mentioned are part of Mac OS X already. Cups is to manage printers, netbeans is an IDE, drjava is for writing java applications, nbprofiler is to uncover memory leaks, and .profile can be used to set up aliases that act as shortcuts to commands. It is an optional file which tells the system which commands to run when the user whose profile file it is logs in. Hope this helped!
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