Dolphin still can't find hidden files. Any other application/cmdline for it?

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1

Hi,

KDE Plasma. Since ever Dolphin won’t locate hidden files, even if “show hidden files” is selected (F8, Alt+.).

The only post I could find about this is from 2013: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/488756-Dolphin-gt-Search-does-not-find-hidden-files-folders?p=2572426#post2572426

What other ways I could use to do this?

Thanks,

Bruno

2

Explaining better: Dolphin can’t find hidden files/folders and non-dot files/folders under a hidden folder.

For example, I have both files and folders named seven* under ~/.local, but can’t find then with Dolphin nor with ls:

:~> ls -lR seven*
ls: não foi possível acessar 'seven*': Arquivo ou diretório não encontrado* (couldn't access 'seven*': File or folder not found)*
:~>
3

Hi
What about;


ls -lRa . |grep seven
4

Seems to work OK with dolphin 18.12.3 on this leap 15.1 system…

https://paste.opensuse.org/view/raw/2a95badf

… or am I misinterpreting your problem?

BTW, dolphin’s “show hidden” is on a per directory basis.

5

Not completely. On older Plasma5 versions, there was an option “Apply to all folders” in the folder properties. On recent Plasma5 there’s “Adjust view properties” ( translated from dutch ), which applies to all folders.

And, I confirm what malcolmlewis wrote. The ls command misses the folder directive which tells it which folder is to be displayed recursively.

6

I should have checked the options first…

“Configure Dolphin -> General -> Behaviour” enables the choice of “Remember properties for each folder” or “Use common properties for all folders”

For as long as I remember I’ve used “Remember properties for each folder”, so long in fact I’d forgotten I’d changed it, common properties is I believe the default. Thus my comment “show hidden” is on a per directory basis. I apologise for any confusion I may have caused.

7

That works, thanks!

8

Sorry to say this but there are man pages, even for ls. There you will find that ls -a shows you all files including the hidden ones. Simply using ls does not do that.
When it should do that there is no point of making files invisible because they will be visible with every ls command.

9

I agree. And when you read that man page, you will also see that the wording “hidden files” is not used there. It just says “entries starting with .”.

IMHO “hidden files” is an MS-DOS feature, where file systems have a “hidden” bit in the meta data of a file. That is not the case in Unix/Linux. In Unix/linux there is only the convention that file names starting with a . (dot) are skipped in certain circumstances to make life easier in those circumstances. One of “those circumstances” is in listings where e.g. configuration files are mixed with data files of interest, which is often the case in a user’s home directory.

The term “hidden files” is IMHO one of those lingo words that is a leftover from former MS-DOS users that thought them to cover similar items in Linux and thus could be used instead of proper Unix terms. Leading to confusion and misinterpretation.