Today I was trying to find the location of my chat logs for gaim in Ubuntu and noticed that none of my logs were being found through the File Search program (‘Places’ -> ‘Search for Files’). After digging through a few Google queries, I ran into a blurb about hidden folders prefixed with a period.  It turns out all personal preferences user specific files for your applications are stored in directories with this notation ‘/home/user_name/.program_name’. So all my personal files and settings related to gaim would be stored in ‘/home/alex/.gaim’.

The File Search program ignores hidden files by default. In order to search hidden files, click on the ‘Available Options’ drop down list and select ‘Show hidden and backup files’ and press the ‘Add’ button. This should include all hidden files in your search.

To see a list of the hidden directories in your home folder, open the shell and type the following:

ls -a

By default, your command prompt should open in your home folder. So you shouldn’t need to navigate to ‘/home/user_name/’.