mv removed/lost files after moving to subfolder

Question

while working on my conky files I desided to put them neatly into a subfolder named .conky

these are the commands I ran:

$ ll .conk*
-rw-r--r-- 2  16K jan 28 12:09 .conkyrc
-rw-rw-rw- 1 6,7K jan 26 11:42 .conkyrc_bak
-rw-rw-rw- 1 7,0K jan 28 11:38 .conkyrc.conf_bak

.conky:
total 36K
-rw-rw-r-- 1 20K jan 28 11:49 conky_orange.lua
-rw-r--r-- 2 16K jan 28 12:09 conkyrc_orange_4k.conf

$ mv .conkyrc* .conky/

$ ll .conk*
total 36K
-rw-rw-r-- 1 20K jan 28 11:49 conky_orange.lua
-rw-r--r-- 2 16K jan 28 12:09 conkyrc_orange_4k.conf

$

as you can see the files that where sitting in my current directory are no longer there, nor in the folder I expected them to be.

can anybody shed some light on why they are not in the expected dir? and how I can recover at least the two *_bak files?

Answer 1

The files are not lost. They are in your .conky folder. Their names are hidden (as they start with a dot).

When you first used ll .conk* you could see the files as they matched the pattern that you used (and you also saw the non-hidden names in the .conky directory, because that directory name also matched the pattern). Then you moved the files and you did ll .conk* again. This time the files are not in the current directory, but in .conky. Since they are hidden and since their names don't match the pattern that you used (they are in a subdirectory), they are not shown.

You will see them if you do

ls -la .conky

You might have an alias already called something like la or lla or something similar that does ls -la. If not, you can add that to your .bashrc file (or your shell's equivalent initialisation file for interactive shell sessions):

alias lla='ls -la'