mountpoint: how to copy hidden files

[tiopex]

I'm using mountpoint to fill vfat partition with content, hoever hidden files (with dot at the beginning) are not copied. How to copy them?

[michaelolbrich]

Right, this is a limitation of the current implementation. The files are copied with mcopy. And there is no way to tell mcopy to copy the content of a directory toplevel into the vfat. So we basically copy ${mountpoint}/* and that obviously misses any hidden files. And there is no simple way to change that.

We would probably need to iterate manually and copy the files explicitly.

[Villemoes]

I think that if can ensure that it is bash that interprets the command, we could make it work:

/tmp/test$ ls -al
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  4 ravi ravi  120 Nov  1 14:29 .
drwxrwxrwt 52 root root 1520 Nov  1 14:28 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 ravi ravi    0 Nov  1 14:29 .file-with-dot
drwxr-xr-x  2 ravi ravi   60 Nov  1 14:29 .hidden-dir
drwxr-xr-x  2 ravi ravi   60 Nov  1 14:30 normal-dir
-rw-r--r--  1 ravi ravi    0 Nov  1 14:29 normal-file
$ echo *
normal-dir normal-file
$ ( shopt -s dotglob ; echo * ; )
.file-with-dot .hidden-dir normal-dir normal-file

[Apaczer]

In our case the ${mountpoint}/* ${mountpoint}/.[!.]* ${mountpoint}/..?* sufficed. We had a small issue when overwriting existings files in scripted run so added -n -o options to silence warning for mcopy.

EDIT: of course that fails if no .* OR ..* files matching pattern present, so would require to create at least empty ones and rm afterwards