I recently learned about this "mistake". I always assumed the dotfile was some design feature by ancient "gurus" of UNIX rather than an accident. There is some

I recently learned about this "mistake". I always assumed the dotfile was some design feature by ancient "gurus" of UNIX rather than an accident. There is something nice and immediate about adding a dot to make it invisible to certain things (ls by default, the file explorers in ubuntu by default, etc.) A bit like file extensions themselves and the weight they carry in Windows. It sorts of balances in favour of immediacy of the function over "right way to do things", where the right way might be some kind of meta data for the file, or for it's folder. Funny thing about hiding, is what does it mean to hide? If you can ask your utility to show hidden things. It sort of means "things I reckon people don't wanna see, or shouldn't touch, unless they are willing to take a step to see it". A bit like a shibboleth where if you can't figure out how to see it, you are too dangerous/dumb to edit it, or even know about it. You could instead have security settings for that. Maybe you just don't give the user access to the files at all until they elevate from user to "poweruser". Which would be somewhere between user and superuser. Use chmod to set the permissions, instead of a dot filename format.