To hide the files again, use the following line instead. The Finder needs to be relaunched before the changes take effect, so type killall Finder and press Return. defaults write AppleShowAllFiles -bool YES Just open up Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities), paste in the following line and press Return. The easiest way to show hidden files is using the Terminal. htaccess files or to find a file that you accidentally (or purposefully) hid by naming it with a dot. But every now and again you may find that you need to view the hidden files, for example to browse the UNIX filesystem, to work with.

These files are hidden by default for good reason - the average user almost never needs to change them, so keeping them visible would just cause useless clutter.

DS_Store file that Mac OS X puts in every folder (to save various view settings), but there are all sorts of other hidden files used by all sorts of applications. The most common one you might bump into is the. You may have noticed some of these before, for example when copying files from your Mac to a PC where they aren’t hidden. In Mac OS X, files with names that start with a dot (.) are hidden.

Mac console commands hidden files