Ah, my memory fails me, mostly due to too much time on Unipress machines in the 1980's. 

Sent from my iPad

> On Feb 15, 2016, at 7:08 AM, Charles Forsyth <charles.forsyth@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 15 February 2016 at 10:55, <lucio@proxima.alt.za> wrote:
>> 
>> Whereas I agree that the leading-dot convention ought to be buried, in
>> reality (a) it is not going to just go away and (b) if it was so
>> readily accepted, it must have fulfilled a need.
> 
> There is no "leading dot" convention in Plan 9.
> That's in BSD-derived UNIX, and it's the result of an simplified hack in ls, which was fixed in Seventh Edition.
> If you can open it, it's obviously not "hidden": it's just inconvenient to use with grep *.