20 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
20 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: 'Making dotFiles visible on the Mac'
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date: 2011-07-20T20:56:00.000Z
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draft: false
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---
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Dotfiles, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Dot files are the term for folders and files starting with a '.' so they do not show upwhen using plain **ls**. Tha Mac has a cool keycode to toggle visibility of dotfiles in the **File Open/Save** dialog, but this does not work in the finder for one reason or another. In practice this meant I had to deal with dotFiles and dotDriectories I found on the net some incantation to force the setting for the finder to show/hide the dotfiles. Upon restarting the finder the widows will reopen with the updated setting. I found on the net some snippets of sh script (but I forgot where and cannot immediately retrieve it), and I immediately dumped them in my **~/bin** folder. ~/bin/hide-dotfiles :
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#!/bin/sh
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defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool FALSE
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killall Finder
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~/bin/show-dotfile :```
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#!/bin/sh
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defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool TRUE
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killall Finder
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So in order to toggle the setting in the graphical finderyou drop to the commandline set the flag in the desired state and restart the finders. Works nice… One remark : if you suddenly see strange icons on your desktop, then you probably still have the dotFiles visible selected. **hide-dotfiles** will clean your desktop up again. \*
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