SAMS Teach Yourself Unix in 10 Minutes

Hidden Data

You may be familiar with working with hidden data in Microsoft Windows environments. Unix is similar in that it too will also hide data from you. You need to be aware of this and also know how to view hidden data if requested or needed. What should alert you to the fact that things are hidden in Unix? Well, the file system will tell you about this data, as seen in the following output from the ls command:

> ls /
total 10

If you do the ls command and see you have a total of 12 lines but only 10 are viewable at the shell prompt, you probably need to add an argument or switch to the ls command, as seen in the preceding example.

We already learned about the long listing; now let us investigate those files whose names begin with a