What did I just delete?

I was recently experimenting with the Terminal command that allows hidden files and folders to appear in Finder, but I fear that curiosity may have killed the cat. I think I deleted some files that I wasn’t supposed to, and I’m not sure how important they were. I’m currently running Yosemite and it all seems to be working as far as I can tell, but I’m worried that these missing files are going to come back to haunt me later. How can I find out which ones are missing and, more importantly, how do I get them back? Asha Mantel The easiest way, of course, is to look in the Trash folder – that’s what it is for, after all. If you click the Trash icon on the Dock, choose View > Show View Options from the menu and then set the Trash to arrange its contents by date added, the files in the Trash will be sorted according to the date they were deleted. This should let you scroll back to the date of your unfortunate experiment.

Right-click any file in the Trash and then choose Put Back to restore it. If you have already emptied the Trash since then, but you know which folder the deleted files came from, you could use Time Machine to restore that whole folder. But if you don’t even know that, you’ll have to restart your Mac and hold ç+R at the startup chime to launch the Recovery System, and choose ‘Reinstall OS X’. This won’t erase your data or apps, it just replaces the system files.