This topic has has been brought up ​on the mailing list, and because of the problems mentioned there, I tend to refrain from adding the requested support for hidden files.

I set the resolution to "wontfix" but that's not necessarily my final word, but for now, it is. ;-)

As this topic has been brought up in ticket #63 again, I reopen the ticket. I plan to implement an auto-probing feature as described in [comment 12](https://todo.sr.ht/~sschwarzer/ftputil/63 "Comment 12 for #63: defect: ftp_sync break on wrong mkdir exception (closed: invalid)") of ticket #63.

I have implemented auto-probing of LIST's -a option as of changeset ac808dc5d241b02249e86e632b933e8489cdfabe.

Note a few caveats:

• All servers I tried seem to ignore LIST options they don't know. So if ftputil finds the option is accepted, that doesn't mean that it'll have any effect.

• In theory the server might consider the option, but do something different with it than displaying hidden entries.

• Even if the server software supports the -a option, the server might be configured to ignore it.

• There may be rare programs which rely on "hidden" entries not being displayed. In that case, please change your code. As a crude workaround, you can use ftp_host._accepts_list_a_option = False right after the login. However, this may stop working some day, so you should really adapt your code.

• There's an anomaly with directory entries which start with a hyphen. For example, if you try to list a line for a file named "-a", the server will interpret "LIST -a" or even "LIST -a -a" as a LIST for the whole directory. The entry "-a" will be displayed though. However, this shouldn't have any effect if you only use ftputil's official API.