What does it mean when there's a period in front of a file name?

[Chris Kagadis]

I noticed that in doing a ls- al at the prompt , I get a whole bunch of files with a period in front of
them. What are those files for. Please email me. Thanks!

-Chris Kagadis

[Nospam]

The "dot" makes them hidden for you when you use ls without any options.
That's because they are most of the time files you don't have to mess with
because they only contain settings from programs you use, you don't have to
change personally...

Peter

[Drew Lawson]

In article <some37...@corp.supernews.com>

Typically they are configuration/startup files. For example, .cshrc
is read (if it exists) when you start a csh execution.

'ls' without -a (-a == "all") doesn't show files starting with a
period unless you do something explicit ('ls .c*') or you are root.

--
|Drew Lawson | If you're not part of the solution |
|dr...@furrfu.com | you're part of the precipitate. |
|http://www.furrfu.com/ | |

[Viatcheslav Riabov]

These are hidden configuration files like .profile, .exrc, .fvwm etc.
Dot in front of the file name makes it hidden and it only appears when ls -la entered.

Chris Kagadis wrote:

> I noticed that in doing a ls- al at the prompt , I get a whole bunch of files with a period in front of
> them. What are those files for. Please email me. Thanks!
>

> -Chris Kagadis