MacOS – Why Are My Cache Files & Other “Hidden” Files/Folders Visible? & How Do I Get Rid Of Them

invisible-filesmacos

I hid mach_kernel and private, but the cache.db, cache.db-shm, cache.db-wal of both the system and user folder are, also, visible. Yesterday, I had to restore from a Time Machine backup because something had suddenly eaten all the space on my startup drive. However, these files were visible prior to the restore. So, why are they there and how do I safely dispose of them or hide them to prevent their return to visibility? Thanks.

Best Answer

try "defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO" in terminal.

or you could do a "chflags hidden /path/to/folder"

how did you hide private and mach_kernel

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MacOS – How to show hidden files and folders in Finder

I don't think you can set this for individual folders. To set it globally, so that Finder always shows hidden files, run Terminal and enter the following two commands:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles true
killall Finder

To switch back, do the same but substitute false for true.

This works all the way through macOS Catalina (and betas for Big Sur).

MacOS – Why are dot underscore ._ files created, and how can I avoid them

You can't avoid them (but see the dot_clean answer by Saeid Zebardast --they can be removed from a directory if that is what you need). They're created to store file information that would otherwise go into an extended attribute on HFS+ (Apple native) or Unix/UFS volumes; in earlier Mac OS this would be the resource fork. Finder file operations will create them automatically to store the icon information, plus Time Machine stores some information in them so if you copy a file backed up via TM it will have that information copied as well.

(This is nothing new; I've noticed that XP and later leave various turds around as well, although not quite as many.)

Best Answer

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MacOS – How to show hidden files and folders in Finder

MacOS – Why are dot underscore ._ files created, and how can I avoid them

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