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Hide OS X files in OS 9 to ease transition woes System
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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Hide OS X files in OS 9 to ease transition woes | 2 comments | Create New Account
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Greg's Browser
Authored by: VRic on Jul 29, '03 08:44:08AM

I too found Greg's Browser to be the most convenient tool for that, and even more after I gave a keyboard shortcut to the show/hide command using ResEdit.

Not to mention that Greg's Browser is one of my main reasons to hate the Finder in OS X, as it had showed for years how a column-based browser should work and the Apple folks still didn't get it. For example, the left/right keys select columns, not items in them unless it's the last column, so you can intuitively move to the left to see where you came from, then back to the right without loosing your path like in the Finder. This has the added benefits of making a horizontal scrollbar and a stupid "history" mechanism useless. And of course items don't jump to the left just when you try to grab them, but that may be considered consistent behaviour on Apple's part, since most things in OS X tend to flee when you try to touch them ;-)



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Hide OS X files in OS 9 to ease transition woes
Authored by: Fofer on Jul 29, '03 10:56:38PM
Just have to pipe in a mention for a cool little 6k freeware app for OS 9 called Make Mach Begone! It hides those pesky OS X files (mach, mach.sym, etc.) that might confuse an OS 9 user.

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