It just dawned on me

How do i mark files as hidden
other than prefix .?

i want to hide the fxd and Jpg files Freevo leaves everywhere.

Only way I know of is the . in front of the name. You could throw them all in a .directory that is hidden.

theres really no way to "hide" files. The traditional way to is to use a "." prefix, even then, the files not hidden, its just a common convention.

You could, however, get a patch that can actually hide files. there is one distro that uses some new file system layout (but i forget its name, sorry), im told it uses a patch that causes Linux to hide files, but the files are still assessable if you try to open them (that way, programs still function, and the user sees a new file system layout)

i'm not really after secure hiding just hide them from cluttering directory listings

what about using a filter in your file manager?

yea i use the on in konqueror

just hoping there something a little more universal.

I'm not seeing what the problem with using dotfiles is. They were created for exactly your purpose...

i wanted to avoid editing all the XML files that frevo creates.

pointing to the jpg files without a dot.

universal?!?!!?!??!?!?!

its X, its not universal. KDE and GNOME might use X, but they are not compatible, neither are they compatible with other file managers.

whats the rant about?

universal = Console, Desktop Environment, and X apps.

filter in konqueror doesnt hide things all the time from browsing in other programs, the console etc


i guess there just isnt a hidden tab like Windows.


i'll have edit freevo and all the fxd files to make it read fxd files in a completely different directory or change the names to have dots in them.

The point is that dotfiles serves the exact same purpose as the hidden bit in Windows -- they are both purely for aesthetic convention -- and they have no security or access implications. Individual programs decide how to handle the display of listings of files in directories and whether to hide certain stuff. Perhaps there are some Linux programs that are implemented in a way that doesn't properly hide dotfiles, or intentionally shows them; but that is not a fault of dotfiles or the system. Just like you can easily list hidden files in Windows if you wanted to.

I don't know how freevo is set up, but it may be easier to take Trickykid's suggestion and leave the filenames alone, but configure it to place them in a dot directory.

Freevo by default reads/creates
a .fxd database file and a .jpg
of the identical name of the .avi/video file
in the same directory as the video file is located

the .fxd keeps a refernce to the the .jpg so i cant edit it manually to a different dir or add . to it.

but fxd is going to be tricky considering i must be in the same dir as the file.

thats what the dotfile is for.

Its that, or use a kernel patch, because there is no way to hide anything in the file system across programs that each read the file system, and determine how it should be shown to you, short of a kernel patch, or a filter on glibc using a LD_PRELOAD thing to add a filter (which i think hasn't been done, so youd have to make it yourself).

And in windows, its all the same environment, what your asking for is completely different.