@mitu yup I'm very aware of all of that. and I did some snooping around in retroarch.

and now this is VERY weird. I accidentally deleted the entire rom list I had in the SNES dir. sent it all back on SSH, tried a game and VOILA, now it saves.

I have no idea as to why or how its working now

@moltke44 said in Rom folder vanished after renaming with "." at beginning ... can't locate, rename, or delete.:

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes$ rename ".Super Nintendo Entertainment System" "SNES"
syntax error at (user-supplied code), near "."

You said mv also didn't work. Which syntax did you use? I'm on my Kubuntu Linux at the moment. There, this works:

mv ".Super Nintendo Entertainment System" "SNES"

By the way, please mark commands and their output with a codeblock (three backticks before and after the text).