TOPIC: HIDDEN FILE AND HIDDEN DIRECTORY
File comparison using PowerShell
16th August 2025In the past, I have compared files on the Linux/UNIX command line as well as the legacy Windows command line. Recently, I decided to try it using PowerShell. Here is the command structure:
Compare-Object (Get-Content ".\[name of one text file]") (Get-Content ".\[name of another text file]") > [path and name of output file]
Admittedly, this is more verbose than the others that I have mentioned above. Nevertheless, it does the job and sends everything to a text file for review. The Compare-Object piece does the comparison once the Get-Content portions have read in the content.
What to do when Tuta Mail issues this message when logging into an account on macOS: Could not access Secret Storage
24th September 2024Two things changed before Tuta Mail stopped working as before: modifying Keychain Access settings and upgrading macOS from Sonoma to Sequoia. Either could have been a cause or none of them. The first of these was more likely a culprit than the other.
The result was the same: logging into Tuta Mail yielded an error like this: Could not access Secret Storage. The solution essentially is a two-step process: remove the app and delete its settings folder. Reinstallation then happens after these.
In Finder, go to Applications and move Tuta Mail to the Bin before clearing it from there. That uninstalls the app.
The next step needs you show hidden files and folders using the Command + Shift + . shortcut. Then, go to your home folder (this may need use of the Command + Shift + H shortcut). Open up the Library folder and find the folder called Application Support. Enter that and find the subfolder named tutanota-desktop. That needs to go to the Bin too before expunging it from there. Doing that provides the clean slate for restoration to commence. After this, using the Command + Shift + . shortcut again hides the normally hidden files and folders once more.
Nothing is resolved with the removal of /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/tutanota-desktop. Using the rm command from the command line interface will remove it faster than Finder, though that may be easier for many users.
Using a BASH command to count the files in a directory
12th March 2024As part of my backup workflow, I maintain a machine running OpenMediaVault that I only power up when backups are to be performed. Typically, this often happens when I have new photography images to load, and I have a NAS that acts as an online backup system. The OpenMediaVault machine is a near-offline counterpart to the NAS for added safety.
Recently, I needed to check on the number of image files in a directory from an SSH session because of a need to create a new repository for 2024. Some files from this year had ended up in the 2023 one, and I needed to be sure that nothing from last year ended in the 2024 folder, or vice versa. Getting a file count from a trusted source was a quick way of doing exactly this.
Due to clumsiness with the NAS, I had to do this using the OpenMediaVault machine. While I could go mounting drives on an interim basis, it was quicker to work from a BASH session. The trick was to use the wc command for counting the lines output by an invocation of the ls command. An example follows:
ls -l | wc -l
The -l (as in l for Lima) switch forces wc to count lines, while the counterpart (same letter) for ls forces it to list the contents in long form, one item per line. Thus, counting the number of lines gets you the count of the number of files. The call to the ls command can be customised to add other things life the number of dot files, but the above was enough for my purposes. When the files in both 2023 directories matched, I was satisfied that all was in order.
Desktop.ini on the desktop?
14th January 2008Being an experienced computer, I set Windows Explorer to display hidden files when using a Windows PC. However, on my Vista-empowered laptop, that causes two desktop.ini files to appear on the desktop, one for all users and one for my user account. And displaying hidden files does not seem to be something that you can do on a folder by folder basis. With XP, this did not cause hidden files to appear on your desktop like this, so the behaviour could be seen as a step backwards. A spot of googling exposed me to some trite suggestions regarding re-hiding files again, but deleting them seems to be the only way out. Despite the dire warnings being issued, there didn't seem to be any untoward problems caused by my actions. For now, I'll see if they stay away, yet episodes like this do make me wonder if it is time for Microsoft to stop treating us like idiots and give us things that work the in which we want them to function. Well, I'm glad that Linux is the linchpin of my home computing world...