Hidden files destroys 20G

I'm new to OSX, but I'm not dumb, though it may sound so. I was playing around at the terminal wanting to see how OSX deals with hidden files. So here's how I screwed up 20 gigs in one line:

gala:/users/Ephilei Ephilei$ touch .new
gala:/users/Ephilei Ephilei$ ls
Alien Books Desktop Documents Library

Notice the music, pictures, movies, and sites folders are now mysteriously gone. ***! The aliases are broken, Spotlight is clueless, and Finder tells me I have 20 more gigs free than 5 minutes ago. I can only guess this has something to do with the fact that all those folder appear alphabetically after ".new".

Now I'm scared to touch anything for fear I'll lose my chance to recover those files. Please help!

ls doesn't show hidden files

Try ls -a to show all files

Thanks, but that wasn't the point. A correction: The movies and music folders don't come after "new" so that's not a connection.

I just did those exact commands that you did and my folders are still all there so you must have done something else to remove the folders

Wow, thanks for being so risky! I'm racking my brain, but I don't recall having done anything else besides web browsing. But if Finder says the space is empty, it's gone, right?

I don't store anything in my Movies/Music/Sites folder to begin with and have backups of everything else in case it did actually screw stuff up (that and I found it really hard to believe created a hidden file would do anything to screw up directories)

Click the up key when you are in terminal to see all of the commands that you have done

You can also use the command 'find' to see if you can find a file

where do try those comands?

terminal

Thanks for the 'find,' it's really cool, but to no avail. Of course I made a backup, but I've made a lot of files and pictures in 6 weeks.

The immediately previous command was also to show the contents of my home dir (not more than 60 sec prior) which is why I feel confident there's a connection. However, the connection that a hidden file would delete folders is hard for me to believe too.

did you happen to change your home directory name at some point in this?

I never renamed it, but I did try moving it just for the heck of it. I was promptly told I couldn't.

Ephilei said:

I never renamed it, but I did try moving it just for the heck of it. I was promptly told I couldn't.

Click to expand...

because it says Ephilei$ which is your short name, but the short names can only be in lowercase letters and when you rename the home folder it will create a copy of the old home folder and you won't see any of your files.

I don't understand. What are you getting at? Are suggesting it's possible the folders were moved when I tried moving the home dir? I tried moving it to the desktop but there's no evidence there now. (I realize now that was a really stupid thing to do since the desktop dir is inside the home dir %(

"Ephilei" (capitalized) is my short and long name. Yes, on linux user names must be lowercase, but that doesn't appear to be the case here (but I'm new).