Friends:

I have an Acer Aspire 5100 with Ubuntu 10.04 running. Recently I loaded from a storage drive all of my music library which happens to be in its orignal wav format. I was going to convert it to mp3 using lame or some other program. I worked with the files using the command line with some success. The files were there when I did this. No problem.

I came back to the computer after several days absence and when I got to a commandline I entered "ls -l" no files. Yes I went to the right directory. I logged in as Root no help. The files are not there according to the command line as far as I can tell.

Using Gnome the files are available and playable via the desktop. Are the files there or not?

Gary Baker

did you leave them on the removable drive ?
or did you copy them to a new folder ?

Copied them to a new folder on the desktop.

1 members found this post helpful.

When you say that the output of 'ls -l' is nothing, can you post the output of 'pwd' from the same directory?

I would be interested in the output of:

the desktop is a special type of folder


and is not the default folder that the terminal opens to
you would need to cd it the "Desktop" after opining a terminal

for a normal standard user the terminal opens up to " ~ " ( your /home/YourUserName folder )

gjb@gjb-laptop:~$ alias
alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'
alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias l='ls -CF'
alias la='ls -A'
alias ll='ls -alF'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
gjb@gjb-laptop:~$ ls -alh /home/
total 12K
drwxrwxrwx 3 root root 4.0K 2011-04-02 10:08 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4.0K 2011-04-02 10:10 ..
drwxrwxrwx 36 gjb gjb 4.0K 2011-05-15 15:28 gjb
gjb@gjb-laptop:~$ whoami
gjb
gjb@gjb-laptop:~$ pwd
/home/gjb
gjb@gjb-laptop:~$ ls -alh /home/gjb/Desktop/Music
total 8.0K
drwxrwxrwx 2 gjb gjb 4.0K 2011-05-14 08:45 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 gjb gjb 4.0K 2011-05-14 08:53 ..
gjb@gjb-laptop:~$ ^C
gjb@gjb-laptop:~$

In addition to ls -l, could you try ls -al?

In gnome, if you "right-click" on the icon, you get the properties among which is the actual file name with path. It will also tell you the permissions. As others said, you should cd to the containing folder and list.

To make this easier, could you cd to your /home/gjb/Desktop directory, and give us the output of ls -al for us?

well i only used the desktop folder for links and launchers
never did like using the desktop for storing files or building software
not even in the old days on MS xp and NOT in linux

Yeah same here... I keep all my files organized within my home directory. I have nothing in the Desktop directory at all; I even have my icons disabled on the desktop. It's all conky'd up

If you run the below command form your home directory, you should be able to find your wav files
Below example (for png files, did not have wavs)

I figured it out. It was a permission problem. Some of the files were not readable and the permissions are not readable by linux. I changed the directories and low and behold it worked. Thanks for the help.