Viewing hidden files in OS X

Mon, 22 October 2007

Unfortunately Finder has no option to show hidden files. But if you open the Terminal and ask your computer nicely - it will display the hidden files. This is how you do it.

Open ~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true

and press return. Then restart the Finder by either typing

killall Finder

and pressing return, or hold down Ctrl+Option while clicking on Finder icon in the Dock and select Relaunch.

Relaunch OS X Finder

To disable displaying the hidden files, just repeat the process above, only replace the word true with false.

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3 Responses to “Viewing hidden files in OS X”

  1. I’m sure you heard of TinkerTool. That tool does show hidden files plus do a whole lot more with a mouse click.

    Cheers

  2. But of course, if you’re a serious computer user, you’ll be using Xfile. ;)

  3. Rather than Xfile, I would suggest PathFinder. It’s free, and it’s more Mac-like than XFile, although XFile seems to handle perhaps more file systems. I don’t really care about the latter…

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