Ubuntu – How to periodically turn off showing hidden files

bashfilesschedulescripts

So, in order to hide some files and folders to unskilled eyes, I modified their names putting a dot to the start of the name. It works, and files are hidden. Nosy people that are not skilled will not see them. And using Nautilus I turn "show hidden files" on and off by using the key combination Ctrl–H. Fine. But then I never know if I leave the feature on or off.

I'd like to write a bash script that automatically starts every, say, 10 mins, and will turn off the "show hidden files" feature. So I would be sure that nosy eyes will never see hidden files.
Now the problem is that:

I don't know what bash instruction to use, if any. I'm pretty sure that bash scripts can do almost everything, so, please help!
I don't know how to automatically start the bash script every xx seconds or minutes.

How do I do it?

Best Answer

You can use gsettings to access the responsible setting in the dconf registry easily from the command line.

The setting whether to show hidden files (with names starting with .) is located in the schema org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser and called show-hidden.

Allowed values are either true (show hidden files) or false (don't show them).

So here are the commands to enable or disable showing the hidden files:

gsettings set org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser show-hidden true
gsettings set org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser show-hidden false

To automatically run this command every x minutes, there are two good resources to learn how to achieve this:

Using cron (minimum resolution is 1 minute): help.ubuntu.com: Cron How-to

Note that cron runs tasks with a very limited set of env variables which do not include DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS, but that's needed for gsettings to work. So we have to take care of setting this variable ourselves in the script we run if we need it

I prepared a script for you (with the help of @JacobVlijm who linked me this answer on Stack Overflow by @Radu Rădeanu) that takes care of this problem and can be run directly by cron:
```
#!/bin/bash

# --> Script to disable showing hidden files - to be run as cron job <--

# export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable
PID=$(pgrep gnome-session)
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$PID/environ|cut -d= -f2-)

gsettings set org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser show-hidden false
```
Without using cron: How to execute command every 10 seconds (without cron)?

An apparent approach …

… would be to run the whole script as user root by adding it to root's crontab (using sudo crontab -e). It won't need any password then when systemctl stop/start myservice.service is run. The downside is that you may need to run the backup tasks as another user (say noslenkwah) and have to switch to that other user for the backup. Example:

# Stop myservice
systemctl stop myservice.service

# Do all the backing up here...
# ... and run the backup_command as user "otheruser":
sudo -u noslenkwah /path/to/backup_command --with --some --options

# Start myservice
systemctl start myservice.service

Another approach …

… would be to add the systemctl commands to a file in the /etc/sudoers.d directory so that a specific user may run them without supplying a password.

issue sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/noslenkwah (The filename, noslenkwah doesn't matter, it is just a personal habit of mine to name the files after the "main" user affected by the settings in that file. It just needs to be a file below the directory /etc/sudoers.d.)

Add the following lines and save the file.

Cmnd_Alias MYSERVICE = \
    /bin/systemctl stop myservice.service, \
    /bin/systemctl start myservice.service

noslenkwah ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: MYSERVICE

This allows the user noslenkwah to run sudo systemctl stop myservice.service and sudo systemctl start myservice.service without a password. It defines a socalled command alias (collection of commands) named MYSERVICE and then allows

the user noslenkwah
on ALL computers
as user root
without a password
to run the commands defined by MYSERVICE

Replace noslenkwah and myservice with the actual username and service name. Note that you really must issue sudo systemctl start myservice.service for this to work (not sudo systemctl start myservice (without .service, for example).

Don't care about the "on ALL computers" part. This is relevant only if you intend to distribute the very same sudoers file to multiple computers.

You would then change your backup script to

# Stop myservice
sudo systemctl stop myservice.service

# Do all the backing up here...
/path/to/backup_command --with --some --options

# Start myservice
sudo systemctl start myservice.service

and have it run as user noslenkwah.

Best Answer

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An apparent approach …

Another approach …

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