Files not showing in finder but showing in terminal

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Level 3

636 points

Files not showing in finder but showing in terminal

Hi,

A friend had a problem on their Windows computer where no files would show up in Windows Explorer. In an attempt to restore the files I plugged their (NTFS) hard drive into an enclosure on my Mac, to copy some files across before reinstalling Windows.

However, when I view the hard drive in the Finder, no files are visible. But, if I use the "ls" command in the Terminal, all files show up and can be opened fine. When I copy the folders/files across to Mac OS, they still stay "hidden" to the Finder, but visible to the Terminal.

Is there any way of forcing the files (the ones copied across to Mac OS) to be visible in the Finder, to make life easier for restoring the files once they've reinstalled Windows?

Thanks for the help.

Posted on Sep 7, 2011 4:01 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 5, 2017 4:26 AM in response to thomasp

I've had this happen twice with files on my Desktop. I don't remember how I got it to work the first time (I googled a lot and someone helped me; can't find the discussion anyomre), but just now a minute ago I fixed it using Parallells and booting to Windows. Windows in Parallels shows the missing icons on the desktop as greyed out. If I select them and open their Properties window, the Hidden checkbox is checked. Uncheking it makes the files visible on my Mac's desktop.

Probably not the best solution, but both easy and logical.

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Answer 2

Gladbags

Level 1

11 points

Nov 7, 2012 2:34 PM in response to thomasp

I'm reading my first book on Unix for Mac users.

Playing around with the ls command revealed a .m4a file on my desktop, last modified in 2008, zero bytes in size and invisible in Finder.

From my extremely limited Unix skills I couldn't seem to preform an action on that file.

I guess a record of that file still existed somewhere but the file had been trashed years ago.

I used the show invisibles command as explained by Thomas Brierley and was able to see the file (although it looked ghosted) and then was able to re-trash it.

I then comfirmed the deletion with ls command.

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