Mac OS X - Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder

Thanks for publishing this.

Thanks for listing this, it was a huge help.

Thank you for sharing this.
I’m new to Macos and you taught me something.

Just wanted to say thanks also. (Can’t believe I need to show/hide hidden files using the Terminal).

Thanks for the tip! It would be even more usable if you had the lines we could just copy/paste at the top rather than having to type them out manually from the screen shot.

For those others like me who are lazy, here they are. :)

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

I have to regularly toggle between showing all files, and hiding them. I always forget what to type too… so I wrote a program to do that with the click of a button:

Show All Files Mac

The program is free, and I hope it helps others out as well. Enjoy!

How can you prevent the Terminal window from opening after powering up the Mac?

Also how can you the windows platform if you have lost the password?

Thanks for your assistance.

Supercool !

you helped me out bigtime !

your crap is the shit !

peace !

Yzer

Thought this might help your readers - I found the following script, which will toggle between show and hide, so you can just paste the same code regardless.

Personally, I just compile it as an .app in Automator, and run it whenever I need to toggle.

#!/bin/bash

if [ `defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles` == 1 ]
then
echo “Hiding hidden files.”
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false
else
echo “Showing hidden files.”
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
fi

KillAll Finder

Help please, I did what you advised, and now i seem to have lost everything music movies docs, Says the volumes cannot be found!!! My computer has gone back to its original settings . Please help i’m screwed!!!

This works for me - thanks - but I still can’t see some of the ‘dot’ files that show up on a PC. Anyone have any idea what might be going on? Thanx

sweet!! finally helped to get rid of my hidden files. I only turned them on when I was playing around with XAMPP and I couldn’t figure out how to turn visibility off again.

hello… thanks for the great tip. To toggle this option i wrote it down in a script… hope it helps:

set flag to do shell script “defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles”
if flag is “FALSE” then
do shell script “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE”
else
do shell script “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE”
end if
do shell script “killall Finder”

Really it is very helpful one. Keep posting more hint command you know…Thanks Ashwin patil

Great tip. Worked like a charm. I was getting frustrated with finder hiding (and not copying) my .htaccess files.