Add a file flag for "hidden" files?

[Eric Anderson]

Mark Day wrote:
> On Mar 1, 2006, at 9:48 AM, Mark Day wrote:
>
>> I could certainly provide patches to FreeBSD for the headers, FAT, 
>> NTFS, and probably HFS.  The strtofflags(3) and fflagstostr(3) 
>> functions should also change so you can get at the flag bit via 
>> ls(1), find(1), chflags(1), etc.; I think I could provide that patch, 
>> too.  (I've never actually used FreeBSD, so it will take me a bit of 
>> time to get it installed, find my way around the sources, make and 
>> test the changes.)
>
> FYI, I submitted a patch for <sys/stat.h>, msdosfs, ntfs, and libc as 
> kern/94519.
>
> Yar Tikhiy's HFS web page says that project is on hold, so I haven't 
> made any patches for HFS.  If there is interest in such a patch, just 
> let me know.

The patch applies clean on 6.1-BETA4, and seems to work as expected. 

Thanks for the patch!  I got about half way through implementing the 
same thing, and for some reason, I chose SF_HIDDEN instead of UF_HIDDEN, 
where UF_HIDDEN makes more sense really.

I have one question (for anyone) - in what function or syscall would we 
intercept directory listings (opendir?) to ignore files/directories with 
this bit set?  The reason I'm asking, is I'd like to mark directories 
containing snapshots as hidden & snapshot, and have the system not 
traverse those directories while a snapshot is being taken, to avoid 
blocking on locks when a snapshot is being created.

Thanks again for the work,
Eric




-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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