How To Hide Folders In OS X

Demonstration Showing How To Easily Hide Folders in Mac OS X. Hide Folders and All It's Contents Using The Trick To View Hidden Files and Folders From The Previous Episode.

TRANSCRIPT:

In this episode, How To Hide Folders in OS X.

Hiding Folders in OS X, is a relative easy process.


Topics Covered in this Episode:

1. How to hide a Folder and prevent it from being indexed by Spotlight.

2. Temporarily Unhide a Folder in order to open, view or edit it’s contents, using the trick from the previous episode titled: “Cool Trick To View Hidden Files & Folders in OS X”.

Previous Episode - Cool Trick To View Hidden Files & Folders in OS X: https://youtu.be/IALqNcrOOck

And 3. How to Permanently Unhide a Folder.

Straight to the Demo. Soooooo, Let’s Get Started.

Let’s say we wish to hide the Folder named MyVault 007 and all its contents in the following location.

The first thing we need to do, is rename the Folder by adding .noindex to the end of the Folder name.

Adding the .noindex prevents it from being indexed by Spotlight.

Therefore; the Folder named MyVault 007, will be renamed as follows:

MyVault 007.noindex.

Next, we need to type the Terminal command to hide the Folder in the following format:

chflags hidden /Followed By The Path Of The Folder/

To avoid making any mistakes when typing the path of the Folder, a far easier method is using the drag and drop method.

Basically; after typing chflags hidden, add a space after hidden.

Now, locate the Folder to be hidden and simply drag and drop it onto the cursor in Terminal.

After pressing carriage return, the Folder is immediately hidden, as shown.

To Open, view or edit items from the hidden Folder, simply open Finder, if not already open.

Then, from Finder’s menubar, click Go and select Go To Folder, to open the dialog box.

Next, using the simple trick shown in the previous video titled: Cool Trick To View Hidden Files & Folders in OS X, we’ll just unhide Files and Folders from the open dialog window of TextEdit by pressing Shift-command-. (period).

Now, simply drag and drop the hidden folder MyVault 007.noindex to the Go To Folder dialog box opened earlier, and click the Go button here.

From here, you are able to open, view or edit any items in the hidden Folder and when finished, the Folder reminds hidden.

Finally, to unhide the Folder permanently, simply enter the following command in Terminal, in the following format:

chflags nohidden /Followed By The Path Of The Hidden Folder/

As we did before, we’ll just enter chflags nohidden followed by a space and again using the procedure we used earlier, simply drag and drop the Folder onto the cursor in Terminal.

After pressing carriage return, the Folder is now permanently unhidden.

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