Re: interface to ask is a file is hidden

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 10:22:53AM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> This is a bad interface for most apps. You need to open each file to get
> a fd to pass to ioctl. This is problematic if for instance you don't
> have read access to the file. So, you really want a path-based operation
> for this. 

Sorry, that just not how the unix file interface work like, and we're
not going to add crappy interface because your file manager wants to do
something stupid.  

> 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".