Where in an Eclipse workspace is the list of projects stored?

Question

I use Eclipse with "external" projects - i.e. projects created from existing source.

Poking around in the workspace files, I cannot find any reference to these projects. My question is: how does Eclipse keep track of these projects?

I'd like to be able to add such a project to the workspace automatically (by generating .project and .classpath files).

Answer 1

Windows:

<workspace>.metadata.pluginsorg.eclipse.core.resources.projects

Linux / osx:

<workspace>/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.projects/

Your project can exist outside the workspace, but all Eclipse-specific metadata are stored in that org.eclipse.core.resources.projects directory As noted in the comments by tk421storm, and in Jeegar Patel's answer:

In order for manual changes to take effect, make sure to do File -> Refresh afterwards.