What are these hidden files in my home directory?

Question

My friend shows me how to use the shell (on my mac), and I used ls -a to view all the files in my home directory, and there are a few that I'm interested in, re trash.

Those that seem not native to the computer (I'm running on Mountain Lion) .cups .drjava .nbprofiler .netbeans .profile

I googled netbeans (and cups unsuccessfully) and it looks like netbeans is an IDE, but I never installed it and it was not on my computer. I'm just wondering if some of these files are garbage that is included in other downloads. Thanks for any knowledge you possibly have!

Answer 1

All the files you mentioned are already part of Mac OS X. The cups are for managing printers, netbeans for IDEs, drjava for writing java applications, nbprofiler for detecting memory leaks, and .profile can be used to configure aliases that work as shortcuts for teams. This is an optional file that tells the system which commands are run when the user whose profile file is on the system. Hope this helps!