Re: Hidden files

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Klaus Ethgen <Klaus@Ethgen.de>

> There are two reasons not to use hidden files in /usr, /var, /dev and
> other:

> 1. It generates false positives (as mention before). And to many false
>    positives only ends in overlook the real bad files and directories.

> 2. There is absolutely no reason to hide think in this directories.

The underlying bug seems to be the entire concept of "hidden files".
It seems to me that on the whole they cause far more trouble than they
help. If they are only supposed to be in $HOME (and a tidy $HOME
should contain nothing but dotfiles and subdirectories anyway), it
is rather excessive to let the hiddenness work everywhere else in the
system.

It's a pity that this is fundamentally unfixable because there is no
knowing how many little scripts everywhere that depend on ls filtering
out "hidden" files.

But I don't think I have ever used ls from an interactive shell
_without_ the -a flag.

-- 
Henning Makholm                      "The compile-time type checker for this
                           language has proved to be a valuable filter which
                      traps a significant proportion of programming errors."