Re: Hidden Files Not Being Copied


Subject: Re: Hidden Files Not Being Copied
From: Jason Quigley (jasonq@usa.net)
Date: Thu Jan 18 2001 - 06:39:12 EST


On Thursday, January 18, 2001, at 09:40 AM, Basil Hussain wrote:

>
> In my experience, MacOS is quite dumb when it comes to some things, and
> thinking about the way it probably works leads me to imagine that when you
> initiate a duplication of a directory (or just a straight copy) MacOS
> recursively traverses the directory structure and tells the underlying
> filesystem - in this case, Netatalk - to individually copy each file. But,
> as at the MacOS end it doesn't even *know* about any hidden files, it won't
> tell the filesystem to copy them. So basically, if you can't see it, you
> can't copy it.
>

MacOS is not dumb at all about this. What it's doing makes perfect sense! Files beginning with a dot on MacOS are normally considered to be disk driver files. You can't see these files and copying them to your hard drive could cause problems later.

>
> But, as I said, I might be wrong. Really, the base of this problem really
> stems from the clash between MacOS having no notion of hidden files and UNIX
> systems making prolific use of them. Ah, well...
>

MacOS does have a notion of hidden files. They are simply called invisible files. Based on what you're saying, it could be said that the problem stems from UNIX systems having no notion of forked files. If they did, then a Mac file server on UNIX would be much easier to implement.

Cheers,
Jason.



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