Comments on: Filenames Starting with a Dot

By: Tomas Restrepo

Tomas Restrepo — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:25:24 +0000

George: I wasn’t singling VIM out, just using it as an example. And I do understand it was because of old FAT compatibility and stuff like that (which does make you wonder how long we’ll carry that noose around our necks). And, btw, thanks for all the work on VIM

By: George V. Reilly

George V. Reilly — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:29:15 +0000

I wrote a lot of the Vim Win32 console mode code back in the mid-90s. If I remember correctly, NT 3.x supported FAT-16. I’m pretty sure Win95 (cursed be its name) did. And Bram had a policy at the time of trying to unify the Win32 and the DOS codebases as much as possible. A filename like .vimrc wouldn’t have worked on FAT-16.
(Or something like that. I had to page these memories back in from tape, where they were stored with a lossy compressor.)

By: Tomas Restrepo

Tomas Restrepo — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:17:56 +0000

I’m far more surprised that setting is still enabled by default on Windows Server 2008.

By: Flatliner

Flatliner — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:13:08 +0000

Oh totally agree on that point, I also think it’s a security risk to hide file extensions from users. (remember the old .vbs attachment viruses?). I was really hoping that setting would be off in Vista by default as part of MS’s whole "secure by default" strategy. Sadly not.

By: Tomas Restrepo

Tomas Restrepo — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:42:13 +0000

@Flatliner: That might very well be true; but, heck, I *always* disable that option as soon as I install windows; it’s the most stupid setting anyone ever came up with.

By: Flatliner

Flatliner — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:26:05 +0000

I believe Windows Explorer disallows filenames starting with a . because it’s default setting of hiding File Extensions.
It deems .txt (for example) as just an extension so nothing would show after you named a file like this.

By: Tomas Restrepo

Tomas Restrepo — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:28:51 +0000

Wasn’t ASP.NET the one causing trouble? At least I remember reading something about it, though never caused me any trouble (or maybe it is IIS, trying to figure out the right mime type for it or something).
Either way, anyway you look at it, it is those tools/apps that are broken; not the file system semantics.

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:08:30 +0000

Visual Studio 2003 used to be very troublesome with .folders and files which was a real pain as Subversion created .svn folders for the metadata by default.
Most Windows based Subversion tools had the ability to switch this over to _svn for exactly that reason.
[)amien