Hope someone can explain this!

General Discussion
1

Hi all. Not exactly an OSMC problem, but possibly a feature.

So my OSMC is pointing at an NFS share on my linux box, with video files in. I was looking for a file and it wasn’t showing alphabetically. I went to the linux box and there it was, plain as day. Why couldn’t i see it on OSMC’s directory listing? Then I noticed the filename had a full-stop (period) at the end of it. Obviously a typo in naming. I removed it.

Refreshed the directory listing on OSMC (on a Pi, but that’s irrelevant…possibly). File was there. Went back to linux and put the full stop back. File was not visible again.

Now I understand that a full stop at the beginning of a file will make it invisible to linux, but at the end? I’m stumped. Can some kind soul explain what I’ve just found.

TIA!

2

The Videos and their library sections only show files with extensions that are set internally as supported video files or else had their file extension added with an advancedsettings.xml file. If you have a period as the last character of a file then that is the same as having no file extension so it wouldn’t be identified as a supported video file.

3

Thanks for the reply. So “filename.mp4” would be identified as a video file, but “filename…mp4” would not be? I’ll have to have a look and see if any more of mine have a dot at the end!

4

Incorrect. The file extension is the last characters after the last period.

filename..............mp4 has a “.mp4” file extension on the filename “filename.............”
filename.mp4. has a “.<nothing>” file extension on the filename “filename.mp4”

5

Well in that case I’m mystified again. The extension was always “mp4” but the filename’s last character (before the extension) was a full stop. I’ve since found seven other files with full stops at the end of the name (before the extension) that were also not visible until I removed the full stop.

So we’re talking “FILENAME.mp4” versus “FILENAME…mp4”

For context I totally understand file extensions, having had to support customers at work since 1997 who can’t understand why a file called “Blah.pdf” can’t be seen in a Word File Open dialog box!

Here is a screenshot from Windows Explorer. This file does not show up in my OSMC file listing unless I remove the second period.
image

EDIT: for some reason the forum is adding an extra . after the word FILENAME in my second paragraph. I’ve written it with two dots but when I save it, the forum editor puts an extra dot in.

6

So I copied and pasted your file name into a linux shell and it showed unicode. Is this what the actual issue is?

osmc@VeroV:~/Movies$ touch filename…mp4
osmc@VeroV:~/Movies$ ls -la
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  2 osmc osmc 4096 Nov 11 14:33  .
drwxr-xr-x 14 osmc osmc 4096 Nov  8 14:23  ..
-rw-r--r--  1 osmc osmc    0 Nov 11 14:33 'FILENAME'$'\342\200\246''mp4'

Highlight text and press the </> button on the formatting bar.

EDIT: So not unicode. I looks like you had a file named with an em-dash and that got mangled up…