How are these folders invisible

finderinvisible-files

I copied some music off a friend's old iPod for him by mounting it and using Terminal to copy the "iPod Control" folder to my desktop (High Sierra).

However, that folder (the original, as well as the copy on my desktop) contains a "Music" folder that's invisible, and "Music" contains a bunch of other folders that are invisible. By "invisible" I mean that I can see them just fine in Terminal, but I can only see them in the Finder if I press Command-Option-. or run defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE.

My question is: how are these folders invisible? When I show them and do a "Get Info" on them, I don't see anything that would indicate that the Finder should hide them. They don't have a period at the start of their names. Even if I do a ls -l@ in Terminal I don't see anything unusual about them.

How do I un-set these folders' invisibility so that Finder will display them normally?

Best Answer

Files and folders can have the ‘hidden’ flag set.

ls can show flags with ls -lO (capital letter O).
Set the hidden flag with chflags hidden /path/to/file.
Remove the hidden flag with
```
chflags nohidden /path/to/file
```

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MacOS – Disable storage of invisible files “._” on the cfs or smb network storage

I will admit, I hadn't noticed that the defaults write command stopped working in Mavericks. However, when I DO clean network mounts, instead of your one liner find and rm, I use this:

dot_clean .

The manfile explains:

dot_clean -- Merge ._* files with corresponding native files.

I don't use the -m flag, but you may find it helpful in your situation.

-m      Always delete dot underbar files.

Here is another person actively trying to stop .DS_Store files from being created: http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/2011/12/24/death-to-ds_store/ - looks like he doesn't want them on drives as much as he doesn't want them on the network!

MacOS – How to resolve: files which are visible in Terminal, but invisible in the Finder

Be sure you aren't looking in the root library, but your user library. Skype in Application Support and com.skype.plist are not invisible by default. Try changing the ~/Library/Application Support with /Users/<username>/Library/ Application Support, with being your Username without the <>.

I find it easy to "Go to" with Shift+Command+G while there is Finder selected, and in the path type /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/ and click Go. Then look for Skype. To find the plist, do the same, but with Preferences.

Also note that in terminal, the path to Application support would have a backslash (/Application\ Support), instead of only a Space

Best Answer

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