What are these hidden files in my home directory? [closed]

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A friend of mine is showing me how to use the shell (on my mac) and I used ls -a to look at all of the files in my home directory and there are a few that I'm wondering if they're garbage.

The ones that seem non-native to the computer (I'm running Mountain Lion) .cups .drjava .nbprofiler .netbeans .profile

I googled netbeans (and "cups" unsuccessfully) and it seems like netbeans is an IDE, but I never installed it and it's not on my computer. I'm just curious if some of these files are garbage that piggybacked here on other downloads. Thanks for any knowledge you guys might have of this!

Answer 1

All of the files that you mentioned are part of Mac OS X already. Cups is to manage printers, netbeans is an IDE, drjava is for writing java applications, nbprofiler is to uncover memory leaks, and .profile can be used to set up aliases that act as shortcuts to commands. It is an optional file which tells the system which commands to run when the user whose profile file it is logs in. Hope this helped!