Hiding Files in OS X (cosmetically only)

If you need to “hide” a file in OS X – the quotes are intentional, the files are not really hidden, just not visible in Finder windows – then there is help available in the “Developer” folder (provided you installed the developer tools in the first place, of course). There is a command-line tool called “SetFile” to achieve the hiding:

/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V your_file_name

does the trick. If you should change your mind, use “-a v” to reverse the process.

Again, the file is still visible in “ls” or other command-line tools, but this comes handy when you need to hide, e.g. a background-picture file for a folder.

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This entry was written by Erik and posted on September 4, 2006 at 10:22 am and filed under OS X. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.