What does a ~$ in front of a file name in finder denote

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Level 1

8 points

What does a ~$ in front of a file name in finder denote

I'm a 3 day old Mac novice so forgive my ignorance in advance. A search revealed nothing I could find of assistance.

Looking through Apps and Documents in Finder under the All My Files tab I have many items named beginning with ~$ e.g. Formal Letter 1.DOC and

~$rmal Letter 1.DOC

I can access the file Formal Letter .DOC1 but clicking on ~$rmal Letter 1.DOC results in a dialogue box stating "~$rmal Letter 1.DOC" can't be opened.

Any explanation as to what these are and assistance in "removing or hiding them" would be appreciated.

Cheers

Lance

MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Feb 5, 2015 6:44 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Feb 5, 2015 7:00 PM in response to Lancemann27

"All My Files" is a Spotlight search, not a folder. If you locate the files in the Finder, do they have the right name?

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Answer 2

Lancemann27 Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 5, 2015 7:16 PM in response to Linc Davis

Thanks for your reply

All files display their correct name in "All My Files" and in their respective locations in Finder, e.g. Documents etc.

I'm just curious as to why there are similar entries which drop the first to letters of the file name and are replaced with "~$" ?

Cheers

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,392 points

Feb 5, 2015 7:36 PM in response to Lancemann27

Given that the all caps, DOC, is an old Windows thing, they may be orphaned temp files from when they were on a windows system.

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Answer 4

Lancemann27 Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 5, 2015 8:24 PM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks Barney-15E

Your reply prompted me to look at their "Kind"

They are in fact Microsoft Word documents and .jpg's

Cheers

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Answer 5

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Feb 5, 2015 8:46 PM in response to Lancemann27

Rebuild the Spotlight index. If you try to search now, there will be an indication that indexing is in progress.

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Answer 6

Lancemann27 Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 5, 2015 11:11 PM in response to Linc Davis

Thanks

I rebuilt the Spotlight index as per your link. All ~$xxxxxxxx.xxx entries are still there.

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Answer 7

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Feb 5, 2015 11:34 PM in response to Lancemann27

I'm still not sure whether you only see these extra items in Spotlight or in the Finder, but apparently it's the latter. Regardless of how the files got there, if you can't open them, they're useless, so you might as well delete them. I suspect they are all empty.

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Answer 8

Lancemann27 Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 6, 2015 2:38 PM in response to Linc Davis

Thanks Linc Davis

I have always been looking in Finder. I never knew what Spotlight was or where to find it until you suggested rebuilding the index. This is a screenshot of what I'm seeing:

As you can see I'm in Finder, with All My Files highlighted and for the purpose of this exercise have highlighted two corresponding entries.

You can see the culprit entries are very small files and likely to be useless as you say, however I wanted to understand what they were and if they were likely to create any problems if they were removed.

Unless someone comes by and tells me different, after I will complete my next backup and copy them to a remote disk, delete them from my HD and see what happens.

Thanks again for your suggestions.

Cheers

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Answer 9

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Feb 6, 2015 3:24 PM in response to Lancemann27

Those files are all the same size and are all too small to be valid Word files. I don't know how they got there, but it happened three years ago.

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Answer 10

ChrisJ4203

Level 10

230,281 points

Feb 6, 2015 3:33 PM in response to Lancemann27

Those files look like the temporary files created when you open a Word document in Windows. The file is there as part of the recovery file that gets created in Word incase the computer was to crash before you close Word. Then the next time you open Word, the file would be recovered. When you save the file and close Word, the file is deleted. However, I have witnessed sometimes in Windows if you save a file to another location with a different name, that temporary file can somehow get orphaned, and remain on the disk where the file was opened from originally. If these names resemble some Word files you currently have and they are up to date, then deleting these temporary files will not hurt anything.

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