3 ms·

Why does Windows not deal with hidden files correctly? It's 2021. Hidden dot-files are not a new thing.

• jeroenhd 5y ago
  Hidden dot files were introduced as a bug and left to linger because they were kind of useful. It all started when someone tried to hide . and .. from the output of ls and messed up the if statement to only check if the first letter in the filename was a period instead of testing for the intended use cases. People then copied that behaviour around because it was a cool new trick, not because it was set up as a standard. The Windows method, leveraging file attributes, is actually much cleaner in my opinion. You can set the hidden attribute in ZIP files and most tools do for OS specific files and folders, but I don't want my ZIP tool to put files on my file system that I don't get to see first so I always turn them on. Windows does the same thing with desktop.ini, but I rarely encounter those anymore. It used to be that every ZIP had a bunch of thumbs.db files but Microsoft seems to have cut that out.