October 24, 2007

Showing hidden files in Finder

October 24th 2007 Posted to Geekery, mac

Finder doesn’t usually show hidden files: click on your hard drive in Finder and you’ll see only normal folders.

Finder Folders

But if you open Terminal, run cd / then do a ls -l you’ll see all of the normal *nix folders.

Terminal Folders

To view one of them in Finder, click “Go to folder…” from the “Go” menu and put in “/private/etc”

Private-Etc Folders

Suddenly, some interesting files are viewable! Such as the configuration file for apache in /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf
I usually use pico (a very simple editor which comes standard in Terminal) to change that file but you can also use a good editor (like TextWrangler) to edit it.

If you always would like to see hidden files in Finder, open Terminal and paste in these lines of code (hat tip: Wired):

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder

All-Files-Finder

If you ever want to make the hidden folders disappear again, just run the code again, but change TRUE to FALSE.

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* Comments(2)

Comments

  1. überEllis
    November 29th, 2007 | 1:18 pm

    You may notice the icons in your Finder (and Desktop) get a faded colour when showing all hidden files. I’m happy to announce that Leopard only applies the fade on hidden files :)

  2. Roger Saner
    November 29th, 2007 | 2:29 pm

    Ah, one (small) reason to consider upgrading to Leopard…

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