how to deal with files starting with "."?

[user222]

Is there a way to delete, change permissions, and do anything else with files and folders starting with "."?

[Ethyriel]

Yeah, they're just like any other file, except:

ls -l #to list them
mv * /foobar #ignores them unless the dot is specified, same with cp, rm/rmdir, and chmod/chown

[loft306]

er... that would be

ls -al

to list hidden files

and to manipulate most .foo files you need to be root

su - root

enter then the root passwd.

[the_unforgiven]

and to manipulate most .foo files you need to be root

su - root

enter then the root passwd.

Why?
Even a normal user can manipulate the hidden file (filename starting with ".") provided he/she has proper permissions. You can edit your own ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_history, ~/.bashrc etc. These are hidden, but that doesn't forbid you from editing them even if you don't login/su as/to root.

[Ethyriel]

Blah, of course it is, that'll teach me to post after a couple beers. Thanks for the correction.

But I don't know about having to be root. In most distributions I've tried everything in the ~ directory is owned by that user.

[loft306]

well you can edit the ones in your /home/user dir however the ones in other places should be edited as root
i'd rather edit as root instead of lessening permissions systemwide a bit more secure

[the_unforgiven]

well you can edit the ones in your /home/user dir however the ones in other places should be edited as root
i'd rather edit as root instead of lessening permissions systemwide a bit more secure

Well, a normal user is anyway not supposed to "wander" into other parts of the filesystem for editing files - apart from his home directory (and possibly, some mountpoints). You're supposed to use well-defined system commands/tools (again, for a normal user, restricted to /bin, /usr/bin etc. - nothing that is part of *sbin*).

That's the job of a sysadmin anyway

[pm02134]

I posted this question up in the RH/FC forum under the topic "ls output order" but I thought there might be some knowledge base here in Misc that doesn't look there.

I'm running FC3 and before that, I had RH7. In both cases I noticed that when I run 'ls-al' the files list in alphabetical order, but with the dot-files interspersed as if the leading "." was being ignored in the sorting. In all other u*nx systems I've used, including older versions of Linux, dot-files get listed first, and then the non-dot-files are listed.

It's becoming irritating to me now because FC3 is so good, I hardly use the Windows side of my computer any more. Someone did suggest

ls -ald .* && ls -al

, but that doesn't fix the problem in Emacs dired, where I'm usually browsing my directories.

Does anyone know how to fix this, why it changed, and whether or not the "feature" is limited to RH/FC?

tia,

peter

[pm02134]

LC_ALL="C"
export LC_ALL

this does it. I found it in footnote 2 of this page in gnu-land:
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutil...eutils_52.html