Ancient hidden files - OK to delete?

Question

Ancient hidden files - OK to delete?

I was just looking at my home directory and saw the following hidden files:

drwxr-x--x 4 clintondyches clintondyches	136 Apr 7 2007 .adobe
drwx------ 3 clintondyches clintondyches	102 Mar 24 2006 .bfgmcfh00
-rw-r--r-- 1 clintondyches clintondyches	116 Jan 15 2007 .bi_li
drwx------ 3 clintondyches clintondyches	102 Oct 26 2007 .cups
drwxr-xr-x 3 clintondyches clintondyches	102 Jun 8 2006 .emacs.d

-rw-r--r-- 1 clintondyches clintondyches 1227446 Jan 17 2007 .fonts.cache-1

drwx------ 2 clintondyches clintondyches	68 Dec 26 2006 .gnome2
drwx------ 3 clintondyches clintondyches	102 Nov 20 2006 .lightscribe
-rwxr----- 1 clintondyches clintondyches	177 Oct 3 2006 .login
drwxr-xr-x 3 clintondyches clintondyches	102 Mar 15 2006 .mplayer
drwxr-xr-x 6 clintondyches clintondyches	204 Aug 12 2007 .openftd
-rwxr----- 1 clintondyches clintondyches	181 Oct 3 2006 .profile

Is it OK to delete them?

Clinton

MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2011), OS X Mountain Lion, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD

Posted on Aug 17, 2012 3:39 AM

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Answer 1

mr da

Level 3

510 points

Aug 17, 2012 4:35 AM in response to clintonfrombirmingham

Some of these files, such as .login and .profile, are used when starting up shells - I would leave those. And the .cups directory contains printer information. My .adobe directory contains a file called "userid" which sounds like it could be important. I'm guessing some of the others could be removed, especially the font cache and/or files related to applications you are no longer using.

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Answer 2

Aug 17, 2012 4:47 AM in response to mr da

Yeah - I just went ahead and deleted most of them. If the .adobe directory was for anything, it had to be CS3 related (which is long gone from my machine), so it went, too. I checked around in the various directories and found nothing but old stuff, so I deleted most of the files and directories... I have a backup if I deleted anything of importance... so... and that dont cache was just OLD!

Clinton

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