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 *.