Hide OS X files in OS 9 to ease transition woes

Jul 28, '03 09:19:00AM

Contributed by: sascha.leib

Most of our customers are still using OS 9 for production use (DTP-environment!), and it's only recently that I started to install OS X *parallely* on the same HD partition for future use. Because many users seem to use the hard disk's root directory to store all kind of files, and then clean out everything they don't seem to need, I found it necessary to hide all OS X files that people shouldn't mess with. Here's a short roundup of my experiences:

The problem in this procedure is that the MacOS X Finder also respects the "hidden" flag - besides a dozen or so other ways to make a file invisible. So you need to be careful not to hide a file or folder which you still need in OS X. For example, hiding the "Library" folder might not be a smart idea, because after this, you cannot reach this folder from your OS X Finder any more (unless you set it up to show hidden files, but that's another story)! Similarly, hiding the "System" folder means that OS 9's "Startup Disk" control panel will not find it any more, so you can't easily switch back to OS X. Generally it is safe to hide all dot-files and -folders, especially all in the hard disk's root folder, and these notorious ".localized" files everywhere.

I did not run into problems when I hid the mach-kernel files (also in the root directory), named "mach", "mach.sym" and "mach_kernel". Also, most of the symbolic link files in the root directory are no problem, as they are used only by the Unix system, which does not respect the Finder flags anyway. This applies to files like "tmp", "var" and "etc". Be careful, though, with "Desktop (MacOS 9)" if you still want access to your OS 9 Desktop. Expert users may try to change this file to a "regular" alias which points to the OS 9 desktop, but that's another story again (see this hint).

For most users, access to the "/Users/Shared" folder is not really necessary (and often confusing!), so I hide this one as well. If you later find that you still need this folder, start up the terminal and type: sudo SetFile -a v /Users/Shared to make it visible again. This command also works for the other folders (use a capital "V" to swich the item to "invisible").

Under OS 9, there are a number of tools around which allow you to set the Finder's "hidden" flag. While ResEdit should be on every admin's hard disk, I found Greg's Browser to be the most convenient (you need to enable "hidden files" in the preferences!). Eventually, you can use these tricks to have OS X and OS 9 peacefully coexist on the same partition without bothering the user too much. Hope this helps!

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030718063046424