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Re: Hidden files



Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:

> Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
>> It flags alarms, it is obscure, and generally it is bad form to have hidden
>> files anywhere but under user homes anyway.  There certainly is no excuse to
>> have anything hidden inside the system hierarchies, you WANT to easily know
>> what is there.
>
> Sure there is. For example, mooix uses ".mooix" as a flag file in
> directories that are mooix objects, and uses other dotfiles inside
> objects for fields that are only accessible by methods of that object
> and are hidden from casual interspection (as opposed to public
> fields).

It is always bad practice to hide things from the user or system
administrator, particularly outside their $HOME.  If you need to store
additional metadata about files or directories, you really should be
using POSIX 1003.1e extended attributes.  It's supported by glibc.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
Roger Leigh
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