iCloud Drive folders not visible from Terminal after upgrade to macOS Tahoe

After upgrading to macOS Tahoe on my MacBook Air M1, I am no longer able to see or access most of my iCloud Drive folders from Terminal.

The iCloud Drive folders are accessible from Finder.

In Terminal, I can 'cd' to the iCloud Drive folder, but when I 'ls' it shows only one folder.

If I 'cd' to one of the missing folders, it responds with "no such file or directory:"

I've created a new folder in iCloud Drive, it is also not visible from Terminal.

I've tried rebooting, but it made no difference.

MacBook Air 13″

Posted on Oct 22, 2025 2:28 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 22, 2025 3:27 AM

The Finder and the Terminal application are two different worlds, with the latter being the viewport into the underlying UNIX operating system. While the Finder Settings provide a convenience Sidebar item for iCloud, there is no such feature in the Terminal. It does help to have your Terminal prompt configured to dynamically show your current folder location. Are you using the Zsh or Bash shell?


I created a UNIX soft link to my iCloud Drive folder in the following syntax while in my UNIX home folder:

ln -s /Users/${USER}/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs ${HOME}/iDrive


That is a one-time Terminal command that creates the associated link to my iCloud Drive location. Subsequently, I can access any files on my iCloud Drive by changing directory to it, or using the LS(1) command for file/folder listing:

cd ~/iDrive
cd -

or

pushd ~/iDrive
popd


The above are the same settings I have used (without change) for years of macOS upgrades and no tweaks were required for my current operating system (Tahoe 26.0.1).

6 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 22, 2025 3:27 AM in response to SeaRescue

The Finder and the Terminal application are two different worlds, with the latter being the viewport into the underlying UNIX operating system. While the Finder Settings provide a convenience Sidebar item for iCloud, there is no such feature in the Terminal. It does help to have your Terminal prompt configured to dynamically show your current folder location. Are you using the Zsh or Bash shell?


I created a UNIX soft link to my iCloud Drive folder in the following syntax while in my UNIX home folder:

ln -s /Users/${USER}/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs ${HOME}/iDrive


That is a one-time Terminal command that creates the associated link to my iCloud Drive location. Subsequently, I can access any files on my iCloud Drive by changing directory to it, or using the LS(1) command for file/folder listing:

cd ~/iDrive
cd -

or

pushd ~/iDrive
popd


The above are the same settings I have used (without change) for years of macOS upgrades and no tweaks were required for my current operating system (Tahoe 26.0.1).

Oct 22, 2025 6:14 AM in response to SeaRescue

The ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs has not changed in years and remains in Tahoe.


As for your Zsh prompt to show the following:



In its simplest form,

PS1='%m: %~ %# '


or with my customized implementation in ~/.zshrc:

TPUT="/usr/bin/tput"
Blue26="$(${TPUT} bold; ${TPUT} setaf 26)"
Green="$(${TPUT} bold; ${TPUT} setaf 42)"
Normal="$(${TPUT} sgr0)"
# don't want VPN DNS changing my hostname
MyHost="$(networksetup -getcomputername)"
PS1="%{${Green}%}${MyHost}: %{${Blue26}%}%~ %{${Green}%}%# %{${Normal}%}"


To get the decimal color codes above, I use the following Zsh script:

more colortest.zsh
#!/bin/zsh

for i in {0..255} ; do
    printf "\x1b[38;5;${i}m%3d " "${i}"
    if (( $i == 15 )) || (( $i > 15 )) && (( ($i-15) % 12 == 0 )); then
        echo;
    fi
done
exit 0


Which outputs a nice integer color table in the Terminal.


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iCloud Drive folders not visible from Terminal after upgrade to macOS Tahoe

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