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Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

> Some old way of hiding the file?

An old way, but also it's still the way to hide a file, on *nix systems.

(Hence the "mistake", and the countless hours mentioned in TFA are still adding up, as people forget them when they shouldn't, or don't exclude them when they should…)

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Practically the only remotely common desktop or server OS where it's not still a normal way to hide files, is Windows.

Windows is very common.

I didn't mean to imply that Windows is uncommon, but that you have to get pretty damn obscure to find another modern desktop or server OS that doesn't do the dot-equals-hidden thing. Windows is the most common on the desktop, obviously, but if you step outside it you're almost certainly in dot-is-hidden territory.

Windows is still so overwhelmingly common that it's very possible to never have occasion to touch "another" desktop or server OS. Especially if you don't go out of your way to manage servers, and doubly so if you don't live in one of the rich economies.

GP is saying "out of the many commonly used OSes, Windows is the only one which doesn't hide dot files", not that "Windows is an uncommon OS".

But it all makes sense, Windows is CP/M based, not Unix based.

Unfortunately

that's because they are all based on unix. or is there any remotely common OS besides windows that is not based on unix?

a few decades ago macOS, amiga and atari were rather common, which all don't follow that convention. i don't know about BeOS/haiku. but if that hides dot-files then it's because they ported a lot of unix tools for commandline use.

i could not find anything about OS/2 but i suspect that it worked like windows.

Windows NT was designed by former DEC employees. DEC had a rather low opinion of Unix and dotfiles definitely would have been one of the lazy hacks they disliked.

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