Question: What does the dot mean in the path ".fastai"?

Part 1 (2019)
1

Hi, this probably wins the most basic question award in the entire forum but since Jeremy’s so encouraging in his video (and I greatly appreciated it) I thought why not.

So in part1 lesson 1, the following command:
path = untar_data(URLs.PETS); path
returns this:
PosixPath(’/home/jupyter/.fastai/data/oxford-iiit-pet’)

Took me a long time trying to find where “.fastai” folder is. The folder doesn’t appear when I do ‘ls’ on my mac. But if I do “cd .fastai” i get into his mysterious hidden folder. My question is, is “.fastai” a hidden folder? I feel there’s more to it. Can someone explain this to me?

Many thanks!

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2

Yes it’s a hidden folder.

Google for “os x finder show hidden” for Finder setting to show them.

3

You can also do a ls -a and it will show you all the hidden files in your directory (folder)

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4

Thanks guys. This is helpful, especially to absolute beginner like me.

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