Re: interface to ask is a file is hidden

[Alexander Larsson <alexl@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 05:57 -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 10:22:53AM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > Now, you could argue (and unsurpisingly you do) that ext3 & co doesn't
> > have a hidden attribute, but that doesn't mean I can ignore actual users
> > who have data on other filesystems and want to integrate nicely with
> > them. This includes not showing weird system files that are normally
> > hidden on said filesystems.
> 
> Yes, you can.  These are foreign filesystems, and all access to the
> filesystem (ls, echo, shell tab completion) also show them.  No need to
> be special in your fancy "file manager".

The traditional unix file systems don't contain "is-hidden" metadata,
but some commonly used ones do. What possible bad can come out of
letting applications access that information efficiently if they want.
Certainly it won't affect the "classical" unix environment at all.