LabVIEW
get file visibility info on Mac
That's actually an amazingly complex question. 🙂
The underlaying unix file system doesn't really know the concept of a hidden file attribute like on Windows. On Unix any file or folder starting with a . (point) is considered invisible as far as the normal ls command on the command line is concerned but that's it. The standard Posix file API in the C runtime has no concept of hidden files at all.
The Finder in MacOS did have a hidden file attribute so Apple had to find a way to implement that for the MacOS X Finder. They did that with the attrlist facility which is an extra functionality in the BSD C runtime to access arbitrary metadata for file objects on filesystems that support it. The setattrlist() and getattrlist() API is however kind of complicated to use from LabVIEW through a Call Library Node.
There is another C runtime API chflags() that allows to set a 32 bit value that internally will use setattrlist() to change the flags attribute for the specified file object. The query of that flag value is through the standard stat() function in the C runtime API as Apple has extended the returned structure to contain this 16 bit value.
So you would basicially have to setup a Call Library node to interface to libc.so and configure a function with the name stat and two parameters.
return value: Numeric, int32
1st parameter: String, C string pointer
2nd Parameter: Adapt to Type
The first paramter has to be a Posix file path (that is the native format for 64-bit LabVIEW so the standard Path to String will work, but 32-bit LabVIEW uses HFS paths so you need to find the Utility function that converts a LabVIEW path into a Posix string.
Then you have to create the cluster for the second parameter.
struct stat {
dev_t st_dev; /* size 4, device inode resides on */
int32_t dummy; /* size 4, alignment filler
ino_t st_ino; /* size 8, inode's number */
mode_t st_mode; /* size 2, inode protection mode */
nlink_t st_nlink; /* size 2, number of hard links to the file */
uid_t st_uid; /* size 4, user-id of owner */
gid_t st_gid; /* size 4, group-id of owner */
dev_t st_rdev; /* size 4, device type, for special file inode */
time_t st_atimesec; /* size 8, time of last access */
u_long st_atimensec; /* size 4, nano seconds of last access */
int32_t st_atimefill; /* size 4, filler */
time_t st_mtimesec; /* size 8, time of last modification */
u_long st_mtimensec; /* size 4, nano seconds of last modification */
int32_t st_mtimefill; /* size 4, filler */
time_t st_ctimesec; /* size 8, time of last status change */
u_long st_ctimensec; /* size 4, nano seconds of last status change */
int32_t st_ctimefill; /* size 4, filler */
off_t st_size; /* size 8, file size, in bytes */
quad_t st_blocks; /* size 8, blocks allocated for file */
u_long st_blksize;/* size 4, optimal file sys I/O ops blocksize */
u_long st_flags; /* size 4, user defined flags for file */
u_long st_gen; /* size 4, file generation number */
};
The st_flags in there contains the following Mac OS X extended flags:
UF_HIDDEN 0x00008000
You will have to decide yourself if you also want to check the last file path element to start with a dot and treat it as hidden file or folder too.
