a quick way to solve your prob is you can customize your .profile to add an ls alias which lists all files including hidden by default.

1) to make the file visible. Please remove the . from the file name.
2) when you remove . the file name turns to file.
3) but there is already a file with the name "file".
4) So you have to rename the .file to some other name.

so try

mv .file file1

it should be working !!!

Thx,
Siva.

I Hope there is no other soln. than renaming.
Because Unix directory does not supports 2 files with same name
so you can append a symbol like % infront of .file like %file
or you can rename to another file.
to make it visible.

Thx,
siva.

In PC-DOS and hence OS/2 and Windows, hidden is an attribute of a directory entry.

In UNIX there is merely a convention to treat files with a leading period as hidden.

Exactly! test and .test are totally different filenames. They have nothing to do with each other except that they are in the same filesystem and in the same directory.

As you can see, the inode numbers are different, making these different files, not representations of the same file.

then doesnt it sound like an error in UNIX system. that we actually have to change file names to make them visible.

like suppose one installed program reads from the file /home/vik/impdata

then one day i find that i have confidential data in impdata and want to make it hidden. in that case. in that case that program too will stop working as the file name has changed.

some of you might think am dragging this issue a little too further but i really believe that this is not the correct way( rename) to make a file hidden

It does not seem like an error in the filesystem to me.