Hide volume names in the Finder

Apr 10, '02 11:23:15PM

Contributed by: robg

An anonymous tipster submitted the following:

Like many of you, I wanted to move my virtual memory to a separate partition. I didn't, however, want to have it show up on my desktop. I thought maybe the convention of putting a period at the beginning of the Volume name would hide it. Sure enough, it works like a charm. To rename the volume though, I did have to boot into OS 9 as well as use a mv command in /Volumes.
Although this probably works as described (I have not tested it myself), you may find it easier and a bit safer to simply toggle the visible bit of the volume in question. You can do this with one Terminal command if you have the Developer Tools installed:
  % sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/volume_to_hide
The next time your Finder is updated, the volume will vanish. If you want it back, just reissue the same command with a lowercase 'v' instead. No rebooting into OS 9 and no physical renaming required. There may well be some GUI tools which do this as well (XRay?).

I'm not sure if there are any downsides to invisible volumes...

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