bstempleton (10/12/82)
These days it seems that every program that needs to keep some information puts the info in a file whose name begins with a dot. This is done because the shells and ls don't deal with files of this sort. This was done in the beginning, as I understand it, so that programs didn't pick up on "." and ".." themselves. I really think it is quite stupid that they are used for other purposes. When I want a list of my files, I want a list of my files. If I don't want a file to show up when I list a directory, ***I put it in another directory*** Isn't it about time that we created a standard "system_files" directory (the above isn't a bad name) and used it to put all these wonderful files like ".mailrc", ".newsrc", ".login", ".profile", ".msgsrc" just to name a few? I thought unix was based on "Keep it simple, stupid." Making special file names invisible by kludging programs to do this is not an example of KISS. Putting them in another directory is. Such a change is really easy to effect - Let's decide a name for this directory. Perhaps to make it along the previous lines we could call it ".system", although I'd like the shells and ls modified to show such a directory myself. Otherwise, names like _sysfiles etc. come to mind. Anybody working on a program that uses such a file can make there program deal with this directory. Ie. use ".system/mailrc" and ".system/profile" as you like. Slowly, people will change over to this and the nasty names in my home directory will go away. Such a directory is of course ideal for certain other purposes, like "mbox" and "dead.letter", but that's up to the the authors of such programs. Anyway, this dot business has got to stop! -Brad
ralph (10/12/82)
I agree with Brad Templeton. Lets get rid of all these files starting with a '.' and put them into a separate directory. Amdahl sells a UNIX emulator called UTS, at the University of Toronto this has been bastardized into something called BICS (you don't want to know what this is). Anyway, BICS is BAD, but, BICS does not have all these stupid '.' files. It has a directory called '...' (sigh), where all of the '.' files go. It works quite nice, but the name could be a lot better. I don't know who had the idea, it could have been Amdahl or it could have been UTCS (University of Toronto Computing Services), but in either case, I am embarassed. UTCS has a BAD case of IBM-itis (in fact BICS replaced cards for undergrads this fall) and we know what Amdahl does. How is it that these people can tell us how to make UNIX better?
dave (10/12/82)
C'mon you guys. What's wrong with "ls -a"? I see nothing wrong with files beginning with a dot. You can get to them if you want, but generally you DON'T want. If I'm in my home directory and do an ls, I don't want to see all kinds of administrative files. But I may want to read one of them now and then. The only things that ignore files beginning with a dot are ls and glob, and those can be circumvented (by "ls -a" and ".*"). Dave Sherman U of Toronto
geoff (10/13/82)
UTS is almost vanilla v7 UNIX*, put on 370s by Amdahl. It is *not* an emulator. The idea of ... is Amdahl's, not ours. I won't defend BICS; it's a glass keypunch facility. FLAME Right, let's stamp out these damn dot files! Berkeley seems to have been a great source of them (.mailrc, .newsrc, .msgsrc, .cshrc, .thisrc, .thatrc). Programs like ls and sh that read directories should explicitly skip only . and .., not all files beginning with `.'. v7 had almost eliminated dot files: .mail had become /usr/spool/mail/login-name, PWB's .path had vanished, .profile is the only significant dot file left. But then 4BSD rushed in to revive them. I don't care whether dot files are ordinary visible files in one's login directory or live in ~/personal, but the dot convention has got to go. Make all files visible. EMALF Geoff Collyer, University of Toronto Computing Services
dennis (10/13/82)
Amdahl's UTS UNIX implementation uses the directory name "..." as a directory to hold files named ".*". This seems like a reasonable choice.
mark (10/13/82)
So tell me. If ls showed all files, even those that began with a dot, and the shell did likewise, why would you give a file a name that began with a dot? Berkeley almost adopted the BTL change (try /bin/ls or any USG ls) to show everything except "." and "..", but the above reasoning convinced them to keep the "feature". If you prefer to see everything, include alias ls ls -a in your .cshrc, and you'll get everything. I can think of three reasons not to have a subdirectory for init files. (1) Opening them up would be slower, because of the extra layer of directories. (2) Most logins on a typical system are casually used, with only a few files and rarely logged in on. But many systems like to give people a default .login and .cshrc (or .profile or whatever). If you put them in a subdirectory, you're using up more disk space, and the output of a "du" command will be that much more verbose. (3) Upward compatibility. There are a lot of programs out there that use . files, and we all know what the chances are of getting them to all change. Nonetheless, it seems clear that having a subdirectory would have been a cleaner way to go. The original intent (which I suppose was to avoid cluttering a listing when you don't have subdirectories - can you clarify it for us, dmr?) is certainly not doing me any good anymore. Mark
CHUQUI@Mit-Mc@sri-unix (10/20/82)
From: Charles F Von Rospach <CHUQUI@Mit-Mc> Date: 16 October 1982 21:26-EDT To put my two bits into the discussion, I think there is a lot more to this problem than simply which is 'neater'. I program on 4.1BSD. More than that, I am really the system administrator on the system. Besides the already mentioned problem of du and all those extra directories, there is setting up accounts, explaining things to naive users, and keeping track of things. Putting .login, .profile, and .cshrc (among others)into '...' or 'system-files' sounds nice, but I really don't know how it would work operationally. My personal feeling is that if you spend a lot of time in your home directory (where all these neat things live), then you aren't using the file system properly anyway, so who cares? chuck (chuqui at mit-mc)
alt@Utexas-11@sri-unix (10/21/82)
Date: 18 Oct 1982 at 1818-CDT We are using 4.1 and files that begin with . are not shown unless you use the -a option(unless you are root, then all the files are shown everytime). Howard Alt... alt@utexas-11 -------