Options for .hidden files?

Question

What options exist for the .hidden file? I wanted to hide certain filetypes in a folder, but simply putting *.out, which I assumed would hide all files ending in .out, didn't work. :(

I'm using Nautilus.

UPDATE: I guess if this option doesn't exist, a bash shell could be created that, when executed in a directory, finds all files with matching endings and writes them to the .hidden file. I don't have any experience with the command-line but I'll try this :).

Answer 1

New answer: It seems you meant something other than I thought you did. You create a literal .hidden file listing all the files you want the Nautilus file manager to hide by default you can use this command (from @Jóhann 's answer):

for i in *.out; do echo "$i"; done > .hidden

Replacing .out with the file extension you wish to hide.

Old answer:

If all the files in question share the same extension, and no other files do, then a simple shell command will do the trick. For example, for *.out files:

for i in ./*.out; do mv "$i" ./."${i#./}"; done

This command will move all files in the current directory matching *.out to .<name>.out

Answer 2

Just for fun, I'll improve Jóhann's answer a bit. Instead of overwriting the whole file, this command checks whether a file name is already in the .hidden file, and appends it if not.

for i in *.out; do grep -qxF "$i" tout || echo $i; done

If you want a more general script, this should work:

#!/bin/bash -e

if [ $# -gt 3 ]; then
        echo "Usage: $0 [directory [extension [listfile]]]"
        echo 'Defaults to "." ".out" ".hidden"'
        exit 1
fi

# Apply defaults.
dir=${1:-.}
ext=${2:-.out}
listf=${3:-.hidden}

# Construct the list file.
list="$dir/$listf"

# Make sure the list file exists or the first `grep` will print an error.
[ -f "$list" ] || touch "$list"

# Glob all the files
for filename in "$dir"/*"$ext"; do
        # Check whether the list contains the file name
        if ! grep -qxF "$filename" "$list"; then
                # If not, add it.
                echo "$filename" >>"$list"
        fi
done

Answer 3

Based on the answer from Amazed, I created a shell command to do what I needed it to do.

for i in *.out; do echo "$i"; done > .hidden

This seems to work, is it possible to apply a shell command to all subdirectories of a chosen directory (actually, that's probably another question)