Hide lost+found Folders?

[Xplorer4x4]

Is there a way to hide lost+found folders on my drives so they only appear in Dolphin when I choose to show hidden files/folders?

[james147]

Unfortunately not easily (if at all), the lost+found folder is used by ext's fsck program to dump files and folders it finds that aren't referenced anywhere and from what I know it is a hard coded value.

The only simple way to hide a file/folder in linux is to rename it with the . prefix (ie ".lost+found")... but fsck.ext does not look for ".lost+found" so assumes it doesn't exist.

You could delete the folder, but then I do not know what fsck.ext does when it finds a non referenced file/folder (it could just delete them, ignore them or it could recreate the lost+found folder I am not sure on this).

There might be a way to do it, but I doubt it will be trivial.

[dmeyer]

Deleting it shouldn't be an issue, however; fsck will probably recreate it when you reboot or run it. fsck is usally at the root of a partition so you really shouldn't see it popping everywhere.

To demonstrate. I have three partitions all running ext4: /, /home, /other. I should have three lost+found programs located at /lost+found/,/home/lost+found, /other/lost+found. You shouldn't see any more than that.

So in other words, it shouldn't be so inconvenient that it bugs you bug it is safe to delete. If you have them popping up everywhere then just delete them. The directories as james147 pointed are somewhat hardcoded into memory with allocations of some kind so you can't recreate them with mkdir. You have to use mklost+found.

Hope that's enough!

[Snowhog]

man mklost+found

DESCRIPTION
mklost+found is used to create a lost+found directory in the current
working directory on a Linux second extended file system. There is
normally a lost+found directory in the root directory of each filesys‐
tem.


mklost+found pre-allocates disk blocks to the lost+found directory so
that when e2fsck(8) is being run to recover a filesystem, it does not
need to allocate blocks in the filesystem to store a large number of
unlinked files. This ensures that e2fsck will not have to allocate
data blocks in the filesystem during recovery.

[Xplorer4x4]

I am familiar with what it does. That's why I asked for a way to hide it, not delete it, and yes from my research it will be regenerate automaticly when fsck is run.

[dmeyer]

Well I don't know of a way to hide them specifically. Just delete them if you don't want to see them.

The reason I gave that long windy explanation is that I wanted to explain that you can delete them and point out that the folder shouldn't be very prolific.

[vinnywright]

@hear their is only the lost+found in the root of each file system ,, their is none in /home/vinny just / & /home ,,,/home is a seperat partition and why it has one .

VINNY

[kubicle]

Some file managers (like gnome's nautilus, for example) support hiding directories with a ".hidden" file which is a list of files/directories that should be hidden (similar to dotfiles)...so you could create a .hidden file in the same directory as the lost+found directory and put 'lost+found' in the .hidden file to effectively hide the lost+found directory.

Unfortunately, Dolphin doesn't support that. Personally, I'd prefer a way to hide certain files in dolphin with regexes (so you could go to dolphin settings and hide things you don't normally need to see, like ~backups etc., as the .hidden approach is a tad clumsy...probably why it hasn't been implemented in dolphin).

You could also use a filesystem that doesn't "need" a lost+found directory (like xfs), but that's of course a somewhat impractical solution for a "small" problem.

[Xplorer4x4]

Personally, I don't see what is so clumsy about the .hidden file method. I tried that already had was disappointed to see it didn't work in Dolphin.

Personally, I think the Windows method is quite practical in terms of a simple gui solution. I don't care if a solution is cli or gui based in this case.

[Snowhog]

I'm confused. Creating/using 'dotted' files and/or folders (hidden files/folders) works in Dolphin. Why are you both saying it doesn't?

[Xplorer4x4]

I'm confused. Creating/using 'dotted' files and/or folders (hidden files/folders) works in Dolphin. Why are you both saying it doesn't?

Read Kubicle's post. I didn't say 'dotted' files do not work. They do. The .hidden file does not(nautilus method).

[kubicle]

Personally, I don't see what is so clumsy about the .hidden file method. I tried that already had was disappointed to see it didn't work in Dolphin.

Well it wouldn't be terribly clumsy in the case that all you want to do is hide a few lost+found directories (and it would certainly be better than nothing), but it isn't that good if you wish to hide many files or directories (as you would need to create/manage a lot of .hidden files)...or hide all *.tmp files across a whole file system, for example. It would IMO be a better solution if you could tell dolphin to hide all lost+found directories and/or all temp files or .xxx files etc. the "hide-mask regexes" could be stored in dolphin config file to not add cruft to the file system (like a thousand .hidden files).

@snowhog:
Like Xplorer4x4 mentioned, I wasn't talking about dot-files, the ".hidden" file is a method to hide files/directories that aren't dotfiles (and isn't supported in dolphin).

[james147]

It would IMO be a better solution if you could tell dolphin to hide all lost+found directories and/or all temp files or .xxx files etc. the "hide-mask regexes" could be stored in dolphin config file to not add cruft to the file system (like a thousand .hidden files)..

That sounds like a feature request