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