October 25, 2004

  • Yet another quirky Mac OS X thing: If you hit shift-command-g, you get a dialog asking you for a path to show in the Finder. If you enter, for instance, ~/.brag, you'll see the contents of that folder, which would normally be hidden from view.

    So let's say you put the window into 'browser' mode, which lets you click and drag the .brag folder around. You click on it, and hit command-delete, which sends it to the trash.

    But wait! You look at the trash can in the Dock, and it's empty! How can this be? Easy. Just as the Finder won't show you directories starting with ., the trash doesn't think they exist, either.

    Use the Terminal, navigate to ~/.Trash (ironically, itself a dotfile), and there's .brag.

    This, my friends, is a bug. If I weren't a sophisticated power user (aka 33L33T HAKKUR!!1!!), I'd end up never reclaiming the 300 megabytes used for .brag, because I wouldn't even know it was there.