R – OSX – always hide certain files

macosterminal

I know how to show and hide hidden files in the Terminal – but is there a way to hide certain files like .DS_STORE when showing hidden files? Make certain files super-hidden, so to speak?

Best Solution

Use chflags with the hidden option

ie: chflags hidden fileToHide to hide the file from the Finde

and chflags nohidden fileToHide to show the file

Please do keep in mind the warning in man page:

Only a limited number of utilities are chflags aware. Some of these tools include ls(1), cp(1), find(1), install(1), dump(8), and restore(8). In particular a tool which is not currently chflags aware is the pax(1) utility.

What that means is that while you won't see in the Finder or Open/Save dialog boxes, the Terminal will still see it and possibly other programs that don't respect BSD flags.

Related Solutions

Macos – How to move the cursor word by word in the OS X Terminal

Out of the box you can use the quite bizarre Esc+F to move to the beginning of the next word and Esc+B to move to the beginning of the current word.

Git – How to Remove .DS_Store files from a Git repository

Remove existing files from the repository:

find . -name .DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch

Add this line:

.DS_Store

to the file .gitignore, which can be found at the top level of your repository (or create the file if it isn't there already). You can do this easily with this command in the top directory:

echo .DS_Store >> .gitignore

Then commit the file to the repo:

git add .gitignore
git commit -m '.DS_Store banished!'

Best Solution

Related Solutions

Macos – How to move the cursor word by word in the OS X Terminal

Git – How to Remove .DS_Store files from a Git repository

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