And for anyone who doesn't know why .files are treated differently: In every Unix folder there are two special files, named '.' and '..' - the first is a link

And for anyone who doesn't know why .files are treated differently: In every Unix folder there are two special files, named '.' and '..' - the first is a link to the current folder, the second to the parent. It was annoying to see these two files listed every time you wanted to see what was in a folder (using ls) so `ls` learnt to not show these files by default. The way that was coded was (erroneously) to not show any file whose name started with a '.' People eventually realised that this had the unintended side effect of hiding files that start with '.' and found it useful, so the bug became a feature.