I have lost files mysteriously a few times from my Eclipse workspace folder, and previously I assumed that I must have deleted them, but this time I know for sure that I didn’t.
I entered a folder for a Java project. I listed the files. There were several text files. I then opened one in gedit to look at it. As far as I remember, I then did something in libreoffice Calc (to a spreadsheet file in a completely separate location), then I made some changes to the Java file in Eclipse. It would then have been automatically compiled. I then went back to the terminal to execute the program, but it wouldn’t run. Listing the files shows that the reason it wouldn’t run is that all the text files have disappeared and so has one of the .jar files (called stanford-parser.jar) but not another. I’ve searched my computer for these files and I can confirm they’ve gone.
A screenshot from my terminal illustrates this.
Can anyone help me to understand how this is happened, so I can avoid it happening again? Could compilation delete the files?
You seem to be storing source files in the bin directory of your Eclipse project, which is probably the target directory used by Eclipse to put the compiled classes. Store your sources in the source folder. The target folder is completeley deleted by Eclipse each time the project is cleaned up.
Note that non .java files stored in the source directory are automatically copied to the target directory by Eclipse. They’re considered as resources that must be available at runtime in the compiled application.