Curious Sunday Morning Linux File System Question ??

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 12:01 -0400, William Case wrote:
> Hi Mikkel,
> 
> Thanks for your quick response.
> 
> On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 10:39 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> > William Case wrote:
> > > Hi All;
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > This is the way Linux hides files and directories. You will notice
> > that they do not show up in a normal ls listing, or in the file
> > selection window of most programs. If you have your file manager set
> > up not to show hidden files/directories, they will not show up there
> > ether.
> 
> I understand the above comments.  The reason I included the bit about
> being a newru was that I was looking for a deeper explanation than the
> rudimentary.
> 
> For example, why would Linux/Unix choose to hide files when there is the
> simple option of placing them in a standard sub-directory?  That
> sub-directory could be 'dotted' if a strong need to hide things was
> felt.
> 
> I am not actually proposing this but:  for neatness's sake couldn't I
> create a sub-directory in /home, called 'userconfig' or '.userconfig',
> put all my dot files in there?  Of course, I would then have to change
> *all* my applications to look in 'userconfig' to find the config, *rc,
> etc. data.
> 
> I asked because, the use of dot files has an ancient historical feel to
> it,  but I wanted to check if there might be some overriding
> practical/technical reason as well, and I asked because it was a quiet
> Sunday Morning and I wasn't ready to get down to real work yet.  
----
I suppose that you can look all you want for deeper reasons but there
really aren't any deeper reasons for applications to put their data
files inside of a .file or .dir other than to make it less than visible
from normal user directory access. It's actually quite ingenious and in
my opinion, preferable to another layer of directories which is
typically what you would get from a Windows system.

Thus, the reason is indeed historical and there obviously hasn't been
any desire to change things and given the disjointed nature of each
project's development, there likely won't be any.

As for your 'neatness sake' supposition, in most cases, these
applications have their settings hard coded into the program and you
would likely have to recompile from source to satisfy your sense of
neatness which would seem unnecessary but the great thing about open
source stuff...it's your software and you can make it work the way you
want.

Craig