>We don't need a new special character for every >> new feature. We've got one, and it's flexible enough to do what you want, >> as proven by NetApp's extremely successful implementation. I don't know NetApp's implementation, but I assume it is more than just a choice of special character. If you merely start the directory name with a dot, you don't fool anyone but 'ls' and shell wildcard expansion. (And for some enlightened people like me, you don't even fool ls, because we use the --almost-all option to show the dot files by default, having been burned too many times by invisible files). I assume NetApp flags the directory specially so that a POSIX directory read doesn't get it. I've seen that done elsewhere. The same thing, by the way, is possible with Jack's filename:version idea, and I assumed that's what he had in mind. Not that that makes it all OK. -- Bryan Henderson IBM Almaden Research Center San Jose CA Filesystems - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html