Ubuntu – How to hide files with certain extensions?

nautilus

I have plenty of files in a folder with extension of .dep, I want to hide these files. But I don't want to change their names such as adding a dot ahead of them.
What would be the best way to do this?

Thanks!

Best Answer

You can create a file in that folder called ".hidden" and put any filenames you want to hide in there. I don't believe it supports wildcards, but you can use a script to add the filenames every so often:

See this answer: How can I hide directories without changing their names?

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to hide files with a specific extension

Here's a little script I wrote for hiding LaTeX intermediate files:

alias hidetex='ls *?(aux|bbl|blg|brf|lof|log|lot|out|toc) -1 > .hidden'

I added it to the ~/.bash_aliases file, so now I just cd to the folder I want to hide the files, and type hidetex.

This is intended to be executed at specific folders, but you could make it more generic (e.g. for .bak files) and change it to perform the task recursively, adding a .hidden file to each folder, but that's a little more complicated.

Ubuntu – How to hide (in Thunar and Nautilus) a directory without putting a dot in its name

Nautilus (Update: This should also work with Thunar now) will hide any file or folder that is listed in the file .hidden located in the same directory.

There are two ways to hide a folder in Nautilus:

Nautilus script

Save the following code in a new file in your home folder. Name it Hide.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import commands
from os.path import join


files = commands.getoutput("echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS")
cwd = commands.getoutput("echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_CURRENT_URI")
cwd = cwd[7:]

for f in files.split(" /"):

    f = f.split("/")[-1]

    commands.getoutput("echo "+f+" >> "+join(cwd, ".hidden"))

Run the following command to install the script:

cp Hide ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/ && chmod u+x ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/Hide

In Nautilus, select one or more files/folders and right click. Select Hide from the Scripts menu:

Reload the current location ( F5 ) and the selected files/folders will be hidden.

Command line

Say you want to hide a folder called "Rick Astley's Greatest Hits", just run the following command:

echo "Rick Astley's Greatest Hits" >> .hidden