Linux: answer file always shows hidden files?

[Warren Samples]

On 06/21/2012 02:01 PM, Mark Wieder wrote:
> Richard Gaskin <ambassador at ...> writes:
>
>> If any of you are using Linux it would be helpful to know which distro
>> and version, which desktop environment, and whether using the "answer
>> file" command shows hidden files in its listing.
>
> After caffeine, I realize that the answer file dialog does indeed invoke the
> File Manager, and so you're quite correct in that the File Manager preferences
> should be respected. It is working as designed on Fedora 16/xfce spin, where the
> hidden files are not shown if I disable them from the File Manager. Getting "the
> files" does give the entire list, including the hidden files. So it appears that
> Ubuntu is at fault here.
>


Like so many other things Linux, it may be a little more complicated 
than that. Under KDE (on my system) the file selector used by Livecode 
is not the default KDE one. Rather, it's the GTK one, which makes sense 
and (some) other GTK apps, such as AbiWord use it as well. There is no 
way I find to toggle the display of hidden files although they can be 
found by toggling the search bar in the dialog and typing ".". I 
installed Thunar and setting its prefs to display hidden files has no 
effect on this behavior.

The KDE file selector can be evoked from the shell, with arguments and 
could be offered to KDE users of Livecode apps as a preference. ('if 
there is a file "/usr/bin/kdialog" then give them a choice') This dialog 
has a setting to toggle hidden files it operated independently of 
Dolphin's settings, in my experiments. The shell call

'put shell("kdialog --getopenfilename .")'

returns three lines of sausage making and a fourth line that is the file 
selected - again, on my system.

More info on 'kdialog' is here:

<http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Shell_Scripting_with_KDE_Dialogs#File_Selection_Dialogs> 


It appears you can use many if not all these available dialogs within 
Livecode using shell(), including the password dialog which returns the 
value entered to Livecode. (This is the only other one I tried :D). The 
only thing to keep in mind would be that the dialogs will lock up your 
app until they are dismissed because of the blocking nature of the 
shell() function.


Warren