Mac OS X - Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder

I always forget how to do this because I toggle this rather sporadically so I’m adding it to the public record.

To show hidden files in Finder pop open your terminal and type the text shown in the screen grab below.

To go back to hiding files we obviously just flip the AppleShowAllFiles flag to FALSE.

*Update*
As noted in the comments its nice to have the text available for easy copy and paste into your terminal.

Show:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Hide:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

This entry was written by Brooks, posted on March 23, 2007 at 12:38 am, filed under OSX. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

12 Comments

  1. Tim Darach
    Posted March 29, 2007 at 9:52 am | Permalink

    Thanks for publishing this.

  2. Apple of your eye
    Posted April 7, 2007 at 12:15 am | Permalink

    Yeah, real user friendly. Thanks again Apple.

  3. Dustin
    Posted July 9, 2007 at 8:09 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for listing this, it was a huge help.

  4. Budi
    Posted July 20, 2007 at 1:05 pm | Permalink

    you save my life man.. tx a lot. cheers

  5. Antonie Potgieter
    Posted August 7, 2007 at 12:48 pm | Permalink

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

  6. Logan
    Posted February 6, 2008 at 12:34 pm | Permalink

    Thank you for this! On my mac I have a small script I use to toggle hidden files… so when it came to a new computer I completely forgot! Thanks!

  7. mnate
    Posted July 22, 2008 at 10:04 pm | Permalink

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

  8. Sergio
    Posted July 25, 2008 at 3:34 am | Permalink

    Thanks for the useful tip !! Indeed I was looking how to hide specific files and not all dot files, i.e. I just would like to hide the .DS_Store and localized files and still be able to see my dot files (.zshrc for example). Any idea ?

  9. webchick
    Posted August 6, 2008 at 12:59 pm | Permalink

    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

  10. noob
    Posted August 7, 2008 at 4:10 am | Permalink

    i don’t know why this command does not work for me ……….

    the terminal always ask me for the user that i have to apply the command

  11. Brian
    Posted October 1, 2008 at 3:54 pm | Permalink

    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!

  12. Brian
    Posted October 1, 2008 at 3:56 pm | Permalink

    Oops, I forgot the http part:

    Show All Files Mac

4 Trackbacks

  1. By Mac OS X - Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder on September 13, 2007 at 12:56 am

    [...] linked to this from Brooks Andrus blog so I can store it here for [...]

  2. By Formerly invisible files now visible (e.g., DS_store). How to fix? - MacNN Forums on March 28, 2008 at 2:02 am

    [...] Brooks Andrus » Blog Archive » Mac OS X - Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder ? [...]

  3. By Ramblings › Just another WordPress weblog on August 22, 2008 at 11:34 am

    [...] Mac OS X - Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder Show hidden files on your mac. (tags: mac) [...]

  4. By » Mac - OSX - show / hide files in finder tip on September 9, 2008 at 10:58 am

    [...] http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2007/03/23/mac-os-x-show-hide-hidden-files-in-finder/ [...]

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