#OSX SHOW DOT FILES HOW TO#
#OSX SHOW DOT FILES MAC OS X#
#OSX SHOW DOT FILES MAC OS#
#OSX SHOW DOT FILES PASSWORD#

#OSX SHOW DOT FILES HOW TO#

This article will let you know how to hide files and folders on your Mac. All your important detail and personal files will be safe from the prying eyes of others. You can hide files/folders in plain sight or behind secure virtual vaults and secondary accounts.īesides, hiding files is a nice way of making sure that your privacy is not compromised. But when it goes into the hands of others, I start sweating bullets, that someone might see them or accidentally mess with them.Ī solution for this is to hide your personal or important files and folders. I store a lot of personal information and files on my MacBook Air as it is safe and always with me.

I can’t entirely blame them as it is human nature to be curious.

Have you ever caught people snooping on your Mac? I have been mad at people for looking at some of my personal files on my Mac. Set up an alias for navigating to your most used directories, to commit to a GitHub repo and so on.Want to hide some private files and folders on your Mac? Find out How to Hide Files on Mac.

#OSX SHOW DOT FILES MAC OS#

With the aliases set up, all you need do in the future is type showFiles and hideFiles to show and hide Mac OS X's hidden files respectively.Īliases can be used to speed up your interaction with the Terminal. This will relaunch the Finder (to replicate the step of holding the 'Option/alt' key then right clicking the Finder icon in the dock). This is the command to show hidden files and is ended with a semi-colon so we can then use the second command: killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app The first being: defaults write AppleShowAllFiles YES Killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app'Īlias tells Terminal we're adding a new alias. If you want to modify the behaviour or alias names, let's take a closer look at the commands you just added: alias showFiles='defaults write AppleShowAllFiles YES Now when you want to show hidden files, all you need type in Terminal is showFiles, then hideFiles when you want to hide them.

In Terminal, paste the following: source ~/.bash_profile to refresh your profile and make the aliases availableĪdding aliases to.

Press ctrl + X to exit the file and return to the command line.

Press ctrl + O and hit return to save the file.

bash_profile file, paste the following: alias showFiles='defaults write AppleShowAllFiles YES killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app'īelow that, paste the following: alias hideFiles='defaults write AppleShowAllFiles NO killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app'

#OSX SHOW DOT FILES PASSWORD#

Enter your Mac's administration password if required, then hit return.

In Terminal, paste the following: sudo nano ~/.bash_profile.

As we want this to be a shortcut used now and in the future, let's make it permanent: Using an easy to remember alias, we can turn the above four step process into just one.Īn alias can be made temporarily (just for the use of one terminal session) or permanently. Show/Hide Hidden Files using Terminal AliasesĪ Terminal alias is a name or shortcut for one or multiple commands. It's not the longest set of instructions or the biggest command to commit to memory but if you're doing this a lot, it's worth spending a few minutes now to save yourself a lot more time in the future. To hide them again, follow the same steps but replace the Terminal command with: defaults write AppleShowAllFiles NO Relaunch Finder by right clicking the Finder Icon whilst holding the `option/alt` key

Hold the 'Option/alt' key, then right click on the Finder icon in the dock and click Relaunch.

In Terminal, paste the following: defaults write AppleShowAllFiles YES.

Open Terminal found in Finder > Applications > Utilities.

#OSX SHOW DOT FILES MAC OS X#

The long way to show hidden Mac OS X files is as follows: Thanks to Guido Schlabitz for making me aware of this new shortcut. If you're using a version earlier than macOS Sierra, see Show/Hide Hidden Files using Terminal Aliases to setup a toggle command via terminal.

Press once to show hidden files and again to hide them.

Since the release of macOS Sierra, when in Finder, it is now possible to use the shortcut: CMD + SHIFT +. The Quickest Way to Show/Hide Hidden Files All I need do now is type showFiles and hideFiles whenever I need to show/hide OS X's hidden files. Today I decided to make a short and easy to remember alias to speed up the process. It seems like every day I search Google for the command to show hidden files on Mac OS X, not to mention Googling for the command to then hide those hidden files a few minutes later.

Osx show dot files