Linux's Modern NTFS Driver Preparing A "hidedotfiles" Option

[arQon]

No, no, and no. I absolutely do NOT want the goddam filesystem hiding files from me, ever.

DEs already have a sane way to handle this if you're worried about newbies being confused by "What are all these weird files doing in my home directory?", but forcing everyone to alias ls to "ls -A" - which is the only possible outcome from this - is just utterly stupid.

[NM64]

Question - I don't suppose something like this "hidedotfiles" is also possible with fat32 and/or exfat (particularly with USB flash drives and such)?

[aksdb]

I don't think it's possible without adding some non standard (something that Windows wouldn't support) flags or something similar to partition itself. On Linux (and many Unix like as well) case insensitive support is part of filesystem itself, not user space. NTFS is internally case sensitive and act as case insensitive on Windows due to userland. Since user space on Linux doesn't really care if filesystem is case sensitive or not I don't think there is an easy way to copy Windows behavior. On ext4 case insensitive is implemented in file system and requires adding attribute to directory to make it case insensitive. On macOS you need to decide about that when you format partition and you can't change that after it or have both case sensitive and case insensitive directories on one partition.

On the file system level it could also be done with a mount option. Sure, it's filesystem wide then, but since NTFS behaves (!) that way on Windows anyway, I guess it makes sense for shared drives.

[Snoop05]

Hello all! Do you know Arch Linux kernel still has this ntfs3 module in it? I couldn't find it the last day.

Yes it is, in both latest and LTS kernel packages..

[skeevy420]

I don't think it's possible without adding some non standard (something that Windows wouldn't support) flags or something similar to partition itself. On Linux (and many Unix like as well) case insensitive support is part of filesystem itself, not user space. NTFS is internally case sensitive and act as case insensitive on Windows due to userland. Since user space on Linux doesn't really care if filesystem is case sensitive or not I don't think there is an easy way to copy Windows behavior. On ext4 case insensitive is implemented in file system and requires adding attribute to directory to make it case insensitive. On macOS you need to decide about that when you format partition and you can't change that after it or have both case sensitive and case insensitive directories on one partition.

Ext4 also requires you to format the partition with the -O casefold option. If you don't do that you can't chattr +F $DIR. Also set at creation time, XFS needs -n version=ci while JFS needs -O. I believe those are partition-wide. On ZFS you can set casesensitivity=(sensitive, insensitive, or mixed) when you create a dataset. With ZFS, that's the only time you can set sensitivity and, once set, is permanent.

[dragon321]

A really nice feature would be a case insensitivity option. A proper one that behaves like the windows user space implementation (not like lo-ntfs that basically just turns everything lowercase). Well, one can dream ....

I don't think it's possible without adding some non standard (something that Windows wouldn't support) flags or something similar to partition itself. On Linux (and many Unix like as well) case insensitive support is part of filesystem itself, not user space. NTFS is internally case sensitive and act as case insensitive on Windows due to userland. Since user space on Linux doesn't really care if filesystem is case sensitive or not I don't think there is an easy way to copy Windows behavior. On ext4 case insensitive is implemented in file system and requires adding attribute to directory to make it case insensitive. On macOS you need to decide about that when you format partition and you can't change that after it or have both case sensitive and case insensitive directories on one partition.

[chithanh]

Maybe I read the code wrong, but…
I understand that hidedotfiles is checked only at inode creation time. This means if I create a file ".foo" and then rename it "foo" it will remain hidden on NTFS? Conversely, if I create "foo" and then rename it to ".foo" it will remain visible?

[aksdb]

A really nice feature would be a case insensitivity option. A proper one that behaves like the windows user space implementation (not like lo-ntfs that basically just turns everything lowercase). Well, one can dream ....

[xcom]

Hello all! Do you know Arch Linux kernel still has this ntfs3 module in it? I couldn't find it the last day.

[Volta]

How has everyone's experience been with the kernel driver? I've read that the developers are kind of unreliable and that it isn't particularly well maintained. Is this something that is generally considered safe to use?

Works without problems here. I've been copying many GB of data from Linux partition to Windows and nothing broke.