Hiding modulefiles inside <.directory>

[Pilokino]

Hide all modulefiles inside a directory with a name beginning with the dot character. Modulefiles would be evaluated if targeted directly but would not be displayed when using "avail" or spider commands.

Related to https://modules.readthedocs.io/en/latest/modulefile.html#hiding-modulefiles

[xdelaruelle]

Do you mean at the modulepath-level?

For instance with the following structure:

/path/to/.modulepath
/path/to/.modulepath/foo/1
/path/to/.modulepath/foo/2
/path/to/.modulepath/bar/3
/path/to/.modulepath/bar/4

Having the following behaviors:

$ unset MODULEPATH
$ module use /path/to/.modulepath
$ module avail    <-- no output
$ module avail foo/1
-------- /path/to/.modulepath ---------
foo/1
$ module load foo
ERROR: module not found
$ module load foo/1  <--- ok the module is found and loaded

[Pilokino]

Hi Xavier,

I would personally benefit just from hiding in display/list mode, so the behaviour in your example for "module avail" is exactly what I would expect to see. Continuing with your example, I wouldn't mind if it loaded with "module load foo". But I realise that this behaviour is not consistent with hidden modulefiles, so perhaps some mechanism similar to the soft/hard modifier could be used to choose between loading a not fully specified modulefile inside a .directory or not.

My motivation for requesting this enhancement is that we have a common directory named .license with low-level modulefiles for setting up the LM_LICENSE_FILE for each EDA tool. We don't want users to directly access modulefiles inside this directory as they are loaded indirectly via the corresponding tool + version specific module file, called from within project modulefiles. Showing these low-level license modulefiles with "module avail" has no benefit and only clutters the output.

Thanks

[Pilokino]

Hi again,

By re-organising the modulefile tree and moving the .license directory inside a directory already listed in MODULEPATH, I get the desired behaviour. So I no longer have a need for this proposed feature. WIth an example, I've changed my modulefile structure from:

/path/to/.license/vendor1
/path/to/.license/vendor2
/path/to/tools

and module use { /path/to/.license /path/to/tools }

to:
/path/to/tools
/path/to/tools/.license/vendor1
/path/to/tools/.license/vendor2

and module use { /path/to/tools }

the .license modulefiles are not shown with module avail.

So the trick is to not have the directory I want to hide as a root directory in MODULEPATH

Feel free to close the ticket, if convenient. Thanks again.

[xdelaruelle]

Hi again,

Good to hear you find a way to address your use case.

You may also think of having a .modulerc file at the root of your modulepath directory that defines a module-hide command. This is especially useful if you do not want to rename the directory to add the . prefix.