How do I re-hide folders?

Question

Level 1

3 points

How do I re-hide folders?

I've been using my macbook for about 2 years, and have gone through both the mavericks & yosemite updates. Before I did this, however, I decided it was a good idea to permanently unhide all folders everywhere, and now I can't get them hidden again (I can see .ds_store and .TRASHES most of the time, it depends on what folder I'm in). I do not know how I did it, but i remember pasting something into terminal about a week after I got the computer. Any help on re-hiding these folders that are hidden by default would be spectacular.

MacBook, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Posted on Dec 1, 2014 10:29 AM

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Answer 1

Idea82

Level 1

12 points

Oct 14, 2016 6:31 AM in response to jaa228

I tried all the different commands in Terminal from this and other forums, but just comes up with "command not found"

so I tried this - and found: for some weird reason the com.apple.finder plist file is not in my library.. I have not deleted it myself though. how could this have occured? all hidden files are shown in my finder windows to my frustration.

any help with this would be much appreciated.

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Answer 2

BobHarris

Level 9

53,147 points

Oct 14, 2016 3:53 PM in response to Idea82

Idea82 wrote:

I tried all the different commands in Terminal from this and other forums, but just comes up with "command not found"

so I tried this - and found: for some weird reason the com.apple.finder plist file is not in my library.. I have not deleted it myself though. how could this have occured? all hidden files are shown in my finder windows to my frustration.

any help with this would be much appreciated.

That sounds like you have messed up your PATH environment variable via your shell initialization file. This very commonly happens when following some web instructions on modifying your .profile, or .bash_profile, or .bash_login, or .bashrc, or .cshrc, or login, or .tcshrc (All depending on which shell you are using and what the web instructions said).

Anyway, you could try the following

/usr/bin/defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean false ; /usr/bin/killall Finder

If that works, then you can search for "fixing PATH" and you are bound to find a few postings about broken PATH environment variables.

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Answer 3

Feb 11, 2017 1:27 AM in response to DanTheMan827

Awesome. That did it. Dan is definitely The Man827.

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Answer 4

Aug 2, 2017 1:46 PM in response to teke0884

A new shortcut was added to Sierra. In Finder you can now type command-shift-. to toggle the visibility of hidden files.

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