A long time ago I liked listening to original soundtracks for games. Winamp had a plugin that would play .psf (et al) files. There were files that contained the

A long time ago I liked listening to original soundtracks for games. Winamp had a plugin that would play .psf (et al) files. There were files that contained the extracted code from games for playing the music. The plugin had a tiny builtin emulator that could run the relevant parts. No graphics or input I suppose. One soundtrack I really liked was .hack, including the leading dot. Given that "hack" part and the overall theme of the games I assume the initial dot was quite intended. But what the creators could not have foreseen was that their soundtrack was missing from the majority of psf mirrors (but some had it obviously). I guess some part of some stack ignored dot-prefixed files when doing the mirroring. Anyway, although I'm usually opposed to inband signalling, I am a fan of dot-prefix for hiding. Filenames already have so many special corner cases that you would have to treat them very carefully even without this one. The fact that it is embedded in the name means that any system can roundtrip hiddenness - something that cannot be said for metadata.