Accessing Directories named '.' and '..'

[Derek Franklin]

Hello to anyone willing to help.

The hard drive on my laptop recently crashed. Fortunately, a local computer
repair service was able to recover (burn onto a DVD)the data on the drive
before it completely went dead. Well, almost...

As Murphy's Law would have it, a project that I had been working on for
nearly two months was in a directory named Application, which was in my
Desktop directory (WinXP). When I open Windows Explorer and view my
recovered data, I can see practically everything that was in the Desktop
directory before (including all my shortcuts), *except* my Application
directory. It's nowhere to be found. Go figure.

When I view the Desktop directory in DOS, it shows that it contains two
directories (these don't appear in Windows Explorer), but their names are
identified as '.' and '..' All other file names appear just fine. I believe
one of these mystery directories is my Application directory.

I've tried to open these directories, or at least rename them, but no luck.

I need to recover my Application directory, but I can't seem to find the
command to do so.

I have a theory that these directories where open when the crash occurred,
and since I was unable to run scandisk after the crash, the directories
never properly closed, thus I'm having trouble getting to them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Derek

 

[Patrick]

Hello to anyone willing to help.

The hard drive on my laptop recently crashed. Fortunately, a local
computer repair service was able to recover (burn onto a DVD)the data
on the drive before it completely went dead. Well, almost...

As Murphy's Law would have it, a project that I had been working on
for nearly two months was in a directory named Application, which was
in my Desktop directory (WinXP). When I open Windows Explorer and
view my recovered data, I can see practically everything that was in
the Desktop directory before (including all my shortcuts), *except*
my Application directory. It's nowhere to be found. Go figure.

When I view the Desktop directory in DOS, it shows that it contains
two directories (these don't appear in Windows Explorer), but their
names are identified as '.' and '..' All other file names appear just
fine. I believe one of these mystery directories is my Application
directory.

I've tried to open these directories, or at least rename them, but no
luck.

I need to recover my Application directory, but I can't seem to find
the command to do so.

I have a theory that these directories where open when the crash
occurred, and since I was unable to run scandisk after the crash, the
directories never properly closed, thus I'm having trouble getting to
them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Derek

cd . will do nothing, it is a representation of your current directory
dir . will do the same as dir by itself

cd .. will change to the directory immediately above the present one
dir .. will give a directory listing of the directory immediately above
present one

directorys . and .. are system representations of present
directory, and the directory immediately above the present directory.