fc@usc-cse@sri-unix (10/20/82)
Date: 16 Oct 1982 11:29-PDT Some notes: 1) Filenames are defined as being made up of a set of characters of which '.' is one. Removing '.' from that set is unacceptable due to the large inconvinence of modifying every program and script that uses files. It is further inconvinience because of the increase in space and time required to check the special case. In fact, '.' would have to be a very special case since we probably all still want it in the middle of files, just not as the first character. (That of course would apply to not the first character after '/' in a full pathname. 2) It is no more reasonable to have all files beginning with a dot in the same directory as having all files that begin with a ':' in the same directory. How about 'l' and 'R' as well? Whay not alphebetize everything by directory??? Because, the directory hierarchy is central to the concept of the unix environment. It is one of the great powers of the system to allow the use of the same name in different places in the tree to have contextual signifigance. Take for instance EMACS's clever way of remembering where you were in an edit. Centralizing this would be unreasonable, while having a file in each path that is called emacs_last_edit would not help me to know what is or is not in the directory or what it is used for. It would merely get in the way of seeing what I really want to know. 3) For those who really want to see it all, the ls -a alias (in the csh) or a file in your bin directory (assuming it is in your path) called ls that contains 'ls -a $*' does the job quite well enough. 4) It is unreasonable to demand of a program that it name files by your convention or tie everything to shell variables. The shell is simply another program, and it should certainly have the same freedom of naming conventions as any other program. If it really disdains you, modify the shell to allow the '.' files to be set to other names through the use of a shell variable. (while you are at it modify the csh and all other programs that use this convention to allow external variables to replace internal filenames.) In fact, since you are so anxious, make a simple user accessable facility for facilitating this so the rest of us can trivially use shell variables for setting internal names. In summary, '.' files make a lot of sense, are useful, and can easily be made visible by default if the user so desires. I for one want them to stay as they are. I think that after using the system for a few years most people would agree with me. Fred