GIO has a feature where it looks for .hidden files and skips files listed therein.

- As best I can tell, it's not documented. I had to read through several undocumented functions to figure out how this feature works.

- I was looking for a solution to the following problem. Mercurial creates a lot of temporary files named hg-checkexec-* where the * part is a random sequence of characters. Icons for these files appear in nautilus and stick around long after the temporary files have been deleted. I have to manually refresh the view to get rid of them. I was hoping to find a way to tell nautilus to ignore them, and I stumbled across this gio feature. However, it won't solve my problem unless the .hidden file can include some kind of pattern matching (glob or regex). That would involve switching the implementation from a hash table to some other data structure.

(I don't know for sure, but I think mercurial creates all these files because it's cross platform and there may be features of file systems that can only be detected this way.)