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I have read many Questions and Answers here. In some of them there are directories that I cannot find on my computer, for example:

/home/username/.local/
~/.local/share/Steam

What is ~, what is folder start with ., and how I can access these folders?

Oli
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Adi Yono
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2 Answers2

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~ is a special shell replacement. It's replaced with your home directory (typically /home/$USER but not neccessarily). It's a shortcut we use because it's nice and short and it's impossible to know everybody's $HOME.

Files and directories prepended with a dot are hidden. In Windows it's a boolean setting on files, in Unix it's based on the filename. You can still access them though:

  • In Ubuntu's default file browser you can:
    • Toggle the display of hidden files
    • Use the address bar to manually go to the path (Control + L to toggle raw address mode).
    • Use a run dialogue (Alt+F2) to run nautilus <full path>
  • In a terminal you can cd directly to the path.
Community
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Oli
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~ is for accessing your home directory , if you type cd ~ you will reach your home directory.

For example you want to go to Music directory from any directory just type:

cd ~/Music

If a directory name starts with dot . it means that is hidden however you can access it from cd .foldername, also there are other uses of dot like:

1) cd . u remain in the same folder where you are before entering this command

2) cd .. go to previous folder from the current folder NOTE : Folder and Directory are used interchangeably

krt
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jerry
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