Tiger Hidden Files Customization?

N

notbrain

Registered
Hello, I am curious if anyone can point me in the direction of finding out how Tiger hides files that are supposed to be hidden. I already know which plist to edit if I want to toggle show/hide hidden files, but I want to be able to customize the actual filenames that are hidden...I'm on 10.4.6.

Thanks!
Brian
 
Tiger uses the standard UNIX notation for hidden files: it places a period (".") at the beginning of the filename.

I wouldn't recommend changing the names of any invisible system files -- they're usually named a certain way for a reason, and they're usually invisible for a reason.
 
I guess I should have explained a bit better: I already run with *all* files shown - nothing is hidden in the finder. Now I want to pare down showing ALL hidden files and begin hiding files as I come across them and realize I will never need to see that file again (ie, .Trashes, .DS_Store, etc).

Is there a way to modify this? Or does it just hide all files that start with a dot and that's it?

(Don't worry about me screwing up my system, I'll leave that up to trying to compile the mb_string extension into PHP5... =) )

Thanks,
Brian
 
The files that are hidden in the root "/" directory are listed in .hidden. All other files starting with a "." character will be hidden (assuming of course you don't have the show-all-hidden-files option on in Finder).

There is really no reason why you should need to turn off the file hiding options in Finder. The files that have been hidden are all ones that you're never going to want to go into anyway, and even then you can still open these files/folders both through the terminal's "open" command or through Finder's "Go to folder" command.

If I were you, I'd just turn Finder's hiding of files back on and trust it to do its job.
 
I don't understand everyone's "horror" at the fact that I'm showing all hidden files. In my work, I deal with .htaccess, .cshrc, and other dot files that I'd like to edit on a regular basis that are all hidden under the umbrella of the dot file. That's not what I want. I want to only hide the files I want to hide, and in the process learn something about how the OS works. Just because they come hidden, doesn't mean they have to be hidden "for my own good". I have a good idea of what I'm doing. I'm just trying to get MacOSX to behave the way *I* want it to. No harm in that right?
 
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