Need help! Lost everything! ok, at least the important open office files

[zebracandy]

I'm brand new to linux, I've had my little baby for just a couple weeks now and everythings been great with my new acer aspire one, but today when i started up and went to open some files, they were gone. I can search for them and they are somewhere, but in read only format. What on earth? What do i do? Please help this newbie, I've lost days of work in just one of the files!

[Cabhan]

It just magically happened one day? That's never fun.

You say that you know where they're located. Can you open up your terminal and run the command "ls -l /path/to/file", replacing the path with the actual path of the file? This will help us discover the current status of the files.

[zebracandy]

Ok, well, i tried that using "user/documents/file name.doc" and it flashed something on the screen and went away.

in the meantime while waiting for an answer I was able to drag the documents over to my disk/documents and now they are read/write capable woohoo! But, it looks like open office is defaulting to this wierd directory that doesn't allow me to open it up and edit. since i'm a convert from windows, i assumed that it was dumping it into the correct "documents" folder. But I guess I want the one on "my disk?"

[devils casper]

It looks like permission issues. Could you post exact path of storage folder as suggested by Cabhan?

ls -l /path/of/file