Hidden file processed during File scanning on OSX (Mac)

[SonicREP]

It seems that during the file scanning process of Minimserver, hidden files are being processed. While it is likely that most of the hidden files are not music files and thus rejected quickly, this can still lead to unnecessary processing, especially for large music libraries like the one you have with 150K tracks. The standard naming convention for OSX and UNIX is to hide files/directories starting with a dot ('.') For example OSX scatters hidden .DS_Store files whenever using it's Finder to look at directories. I am using a OSX (Mac) to store my FLAC files into artist directories. Other file types may also be stored in those directories (e.g., .mp3, .jpg, .pdf for booklets), and hidden files of my own.

According to the Minimserver documentation, when running on Windows, hidden and system files and folders are excluded from scanning. However, there is no mention of how hidden files are handled on OSX or UNIX systems. This raises questions about why hidden files are automatically excluded on Windows but not on other file systems, given that these file systems should have a utility to indicate whether a file is hidden or not, thereby avoiding dependence on naming conventions across different operating systems.

My workaround is to use minimserver's excludePattern property set to ".*", which excludes all hidden files ‘starting with a dot ('.') ‘ from the scanning process. I can use a variety of excluding patterns and get the desired effect. While this resolved the processing issue, it does raise the question of why Minimserver cannot handle hidden files on OSX and UNIX systems like it does on Windows.

[simoncn]

MinimServer used to do this but it caused problems because there are some artist names, album names and track names that start with '.' or '...' and users didn't understand why they could name their files and folders in this way on Windows but copying these files or folders to a NAS made MinimServer unable to find them.

To solve this problem, automatic exclusion of Linux/Unix files and folders whose names start with a dot ('.') was replaced with the excludePattern property to provide a more flexible way of optionally excluding files and folders based on characters in the name that works consistently on all platforms.