10.4: Hide files using the .hidden file

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May 15, '05 12:06:00AM • Contributed by: pheed

Under 10.4, my Dock icon for my internal hard drive was showing mach and mach.sym when control-clicked. This irritated me so I decided to check out .hidden in the root directory. To my surprise, that file has been removed under 10.4. On a hunch, I decided to recreate the file using pico. I entered this text exactly into the file (again, this is in the top-level directory):

mach
mach.sym

And I restarted the system. Sure enough, after the restart, I found that 10.4 respects the file, even though it's no longer installed by default. Those files no longer appear in my Dock icon for the hard drive.

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10.4: Hide files using the .hidden file
Authored by: juz10mac on May 17, '05 01:10:39PM

I found the same thing when tinkering with my new installation of 10.4.

10.4: Use SetFile instead of .hidden
Authored by: mjohnson on May 18, '05 02:33:30PM

Why not just use the dev tools SetFile command to set the invisible property. Seems to be covered well here:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050503183616515

10.4: Use SetFile instead of .hidden
Authored by: marook on Oct 29, '07 06:41:58AM

Because SetFile can only hide Folders.
Now, what is the right way to do this under 10.4/5? My install 'forgot' to hide the system file/folders when installing 10.5, so it would be nice to know what to do..

But .hidden does still work..

---
/Marook

10.4: Hide files using the .hidden file
Authored by: MartiNZ on May 19, '05 12:22:13AM

I couldn't get it to work / didn't know enough about the syntax to get it to work with SetFile but this hint worked very nicely - that was annoying me as well ... thanks :).

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