> There are filesystems that do something very similar to this except
> with "foo@@" being the magic hidden directory for "foo".  From my
> experience with that it works pretty well (provided you don't have
> filenames that end in @@) since most programs treat files as files,
> but if you explicitly use one of those special names the program
> accessing the contents doesn't have to know that anything is
> different from a normal directory hierarchy.

When I was in Norway, the second half of 2002, I was doing filesystem
work.  In particular, I built a pseudo filesystem layer, which placed
the split basically at the VOP_* call point.

The use that was made of this was making a research storage project
mountable as a filesystem.  This particular project was rather
seriously unlike Unix filesystem semantics, and much of the work
involved was figuring out how to design the impedance-matching layer.

The relevance at the moment is that one of the things involved was that
the thing that was presented as a file actually had a lot more
structure than just the array-of-bytes contents.  I implemented this as
very much what's being talked about here: if you have a file /foo/bar,
then you can treat it as a directory; if you do so, the directory you
see contain various files with fixed names whose contents are the
various pieces of that additional structure (possibly things other than
files, such as symlinks - I forget the details).  It worked fine.

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