Patch to msdosfs to hide dotfiles

Subject: Patch to msdosfs to hide dotfiles
From: Joe Groff <email@hidden>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 17:27:13 -0700

I have a USB key that sees about equal use on Mac and Windows machines. When using the thing on Windows machines, the various dotfiles that OS X leaves on the filesystem can be distracting since Windows doesn't hide them as OS X and Unix do. To fix this, I made a patch to msdosfs that sets the 'hidden' and 'system' FAT attributes on files created with or renamed to names beginning with periods, thereby allowing Windows' Explorer to hide such files similarly to OS X's Finder:

http://pknet.com/~joe/msdos-hidden-dotfiles.patch.bz2

The patch is made against the msdos-48 tarball from the Darwin 7.4 source distribution at http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.3.4/. It could use some extra sets of eyes before being applied to anything:
* Since the msdosfs_rename function is a bit hairy and hard to follow, I'm not
sure if the attribute-setting code is in the best place in that function. In
particular, a well-timed error might cause the dot-ness (for lack of a better
term) of the filename to get out of sync with the set attributes.
* It'd probably be a good idea to make this a mount option rather than fixed
behavior. However, should setting the attributes be the default behavior that
a switch could turn off, or should it be special behavior requiring a switch to
activate?

(Forgive me if this isn't the right venue to discuss or submit patches to Darwin; Apple's website isn't terribly clear about the best way or place to do so.)

-Joe
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