Comment 12 for bug 130997

Remember there are two possibilities:

1. Reading the hidden attribute from filesystems that support it
2. Pattern-matching on commonly-hidden filenames like Thumbs.db, desktop.ini, ~*.tmp, __MACOSX, etc. - like a global .hidden file

The kernel devs refuse to consider #1, while dfalk's patch seems to implement #2.

Does Samba do something like #1 that could be implemented for local filesystems?

I don't see anything on http://bugzilla.kernel.org/ about this. The mailing list discussion says it will be ignored, but maybe we should file it anyway?

I don't think #2 is a bad idea at all, though, and could probably be extended to be part of a related idea to allow for files to be "attached" to other files, with the attachments hidden by default (book.txt~ attached to book.txt, and web_page_files attached to web_page.html, for instance). That might require glob-matching as well as filename matching, though, but it's also something done on a file-level rather than a filesystem-level.

Does the .hidden convention allow for any type of wildcard or regexp? I can't find documentation.