Windows rclone hidden files, a la samba

I have implemented rclone mount for folder redirection of my Windows known folders, Desktop, Documents, etc... and with the VFS caching, it works excellent as long as rclient is started silently on login.

The one issue is that the desktop.ini and $RECYCLE.BIN files are a bit unsightly. I understand that the hidden file attributes aren't possible with a google drive backend, however Samba handles these commonly unseen files in it's own way: Specify hidden file patterns to mark as hidden.
For example, even though desktop.ini is a normally visible file, when included in the parameter, it will be presented to SMB clients with the hidden attribute. This also allows . files like .config to be registered as a hidden file/directory.

Sample Samba config

hide dot files = yes
hide files = /$*/desktop.ini

could this be implemented in a future rclone version?

hello and welcome to the forum,

you can use filtering for some of what you need.

I'm currently using that, but the files still are created locally, even if they aren't uploaded to the backend.

I do want these files because they have some use to the OS functionality, but I just don't want to see them.

So what you want is rclone mount to set the hidden attribute for certain files under Windows?

I'm not 100% sure that is possible via FUSE. rclone mount provides the files via FUSE and cgofuse to WinFSP and hidden files aren't a concept that you have in unix file systems which is where FUSE originated...

However looking at the source of cgofuse it does define these

// BSD file flags (Windows file attributes).
const (
        UF_HIDDEN   = 0x00008000
        UF_READONLY = 0x00001000
        UF_SYSTEM   = 0x00000080
        UF_ARCHIVE  = 0x00000800
)

So I think it probably is possible in theory...

In an ideal world we'd store the attributes in some bit of google drive metadata then export them properly, however your idea of having a flag to set the hidden bit for some paths might work...

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