From: utzoo!watmath!bstempleton
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Down with files that begin with a dot
Article-I.D.: watmath.3612
Posted: Tue Oct 12 00:33:04 1982
Received: Tue Oct 12 09:09:26 1982

These days it seems that every program that needs to keep some information
puts the info in a file whose name begins with a dot.  This is done because
the shells and ls don't deal with files of this sort.  This was done in
the beginning, as I understand it, so that programs didn't pick up on
"." and ".." themselves.  I really think it is quite stupid that they
are used for other purposes.  When I want a list of my files, I want a list
of my files.  If I don't want a file to show up when I list a directory,
***I put it in another directory***
Isn't it about time that we created a standard "system_files" directory
(the above isn't a bad name) and used it to put all these wonderful
files like ".mailrc", ".newsrc", ".login", ".profile", ".msgsrc" just
to name a few?  I thought unix was based on "Keep it simple, stupid."
Making special file names invisible by kludging programs to do this is
not an example of KISS.  Putting them in another directory is.

Such a change is really easy to effect - Let's decide a name for this
directory.  Perhaps to make it along the previous lines we could call
it ".system", although I'd like the shells and ls modified to show
such a directory myself.  Otherwise, names like _sysfiles etc. come to mind.
Anybody working on a program that uses such a file can make there program
deal with this directory.  Ie. use ".system/mailrc" and ".system/profile"
as you like.  Slowly, people will change over to this and the nasty
names in my home directory will go away.  Such a directory is of course
ideal for certain other purposes, like "mbox" and "dead.letter", but that's
up to the the authors of such programs.  Anyway, this dot business has got
to stop!  
	-Brad