I was recently converting one of my open source projects from Nuget to Paket and encountered a classic headache for Windows developers … adding a “.foo” directory to a project folder. The leading period is a historical *nix technique employed to prevent the ‘ls’ command from showing the directory when not using the -a flag. E.G. a folder structured like:

- projectDirectory 
    | - .vs 
    | - .paket 
    | - Jenkins-FSharp 

The ‘ls -a’ command would display the following results:

drwxr-----. root root {size} {date} .vs 
drwxr-----. root root {size} {date} .paket 
drwxr-----. root root {size} {date} Jenkins-FSharp 

and this using just the ‘ls’ command without the ‘-a’ option:

drwxr-----. root root {size} {date} Jenkins-FSharp 

For those of us in the Windows world, the use of a period as a prefix to a folder or a file is a nominal headache that needs to be consistently overcome. The reason? Windows Explorer. Unfortunately, Windows Explorer will not allow you to create a folder with a ‘.’ prefix from the UI. I am sure there are great reasons for this that are beyond both my pay grade and comprehension; either way, we are stuck with workarounds to accomplish our task.

The old standby, which is short and succinct, is to open a cmd prompt in the current folder and issue the command ‘mkdir .foo’.

Conversely, for those like myself that live with a Powershell terminal window open, we have an even more succinct command - ‘md .foo’. ‘md’ is an alias for the mkdir cmdlet which leverages the New-Item cmdlet to create your directory.

In a similar fashion, you could use the more verbose method of calling the New-Item cmdlet directly using the -Name and -ItemType arguments. The command looks like New-Item -Name {folderName} -ItemType directory.

With our new folder created - Happy Codin’ & Powershell’in!