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cPanel & WHM Feature Requests Topic File Management

Default Show Hidden Files in File Manager

John Carne shared this idea ago

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As a cPanel user, I'd like Show Hidden Files to default on in the file manager, so I don't miss critical files when performing moves.

A slight improvement that can avoid ticket support for shared hosting servers admins....

File manager cPanel

settings top right corner

Show Hidden Files (dotfiles) should be ticked as defaut

Indeed over time, client were confused after moving their files, their sites were not working anymore, and they had no idea that such function in settings could exist : Show Hidden Files (dotfiles)

I like this idea 1

Replies (4)

freedomizer ●

I also missed moving .htaccess files several times when archiving the public_html folder.

If not globally enabled for all customers, at least a "tweak setting" to enable it would be nice.

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Ron Williams ●

Let's be honest, File Manager has become the most common file management interface for cPanel users and it is time to offer admin's the ability to customize this experience to best meet the needs of the cPanel users

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benny@cpanel.net ●

To be clear, while I do agree that it would be awesome to see more features for file management in the cPanel interface, we don't have good data to agree that it's the most common way that files are managed.

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Ron Williams ●

Fair enough. Modifying this visibility of dotfiles for the web interface shouldn’t disrupt the experiences of any other users, however.

Based on my very limited experience, it seems as if the file manager is “trending” with cPanel users, but I have no scientific evidence for you.

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123host ●

Further to this, as a system administrator, it would be great if cpanel gave us the ability to set the defaults for any of the File Manager settings.

I would have "start in public_html", "show hidden files" and "Disable Character Encoding Verification Dialogs" all checked for my customers by default.

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Monarobase ●

We would also like to be able to configure the default settings in the file manager. Our customers would also like to have start in public_html", "show hidden files" and "Disable Character Encoding Verification Dialogs" all checked by default. This would reduce support tickets and remove frustration from customers.

A lot of our customers use the file manager and most FTP/SFTP software defaut to showing hidden files.

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Aila ●

As a work around, the settings are controlled by files in the user's .cpanel directory. The following information is provided without any guarantee they work in your environment or will continue to work in future versions. They were tested on a development build of version 100.

Show Hidden files is controlled by ~/.cpanel/nvdata/showhiddenfiles A 1 in the file shows hidden files. A 0 (zero) in the file suppresses hidden files.

Starting directory is controlled by ~/.cpanel/nvdata/defaultdir The contents should be a fully qualified path e.g. /home/user/public_html

Character Encoding is controlled by ~/.cpanel/nvdata/ignorecharencoding A 1 in the file suppresses the encoding verification dialog. A 0 (zero) in the file, or an empty file enables the verification dialog.

Of note, the files as controlled by cPanel do not contain end of line characters.

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123host ●

@Kenneth - this is a gold mine of info. All the files in that directory are of interest if we want to do global customisation. I am no expert, but I am sure it wouldn't be hard to write a bash script to update each of the files for all users, including the user starting directory.

The irony is that it would be so easy for cPanel to implement these settings as configurable global defaults and there is no down-side to doing so.

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