How to Hide Files and View Hidden Files on Mac OS X

Mac also offers ways to hide files and folders just like the other operating systems but Mac OS X hide such options and makes it difficult for the users.

To hide a file or folder, you’ll need to set the “hidden” attribute for it. The Finder and other Mac apps will then ignore and not display this file or folder by default.

Hiding and Encrypting files in Secure way

If you really want to hide files or folders completely, encrypt them, and keep them behind a password, you can do it really easily with Hider 2, a great, simple application that lives in your menu bar. Just drag any file straight to the menu bar to hide it. If you want to unhide the file so you can view it or make changes, you can easily flip the radio button over to show or hide it again. To download the free trial click here.

Hiding file or folder on Mac

Instead of hiding a single file you can also create a folder.

First, open a terminal window — press Command+Space, type Terminal, and press Enter. In the terminal, type the following command, including a space at the end of it:

chflags hidden

Drag-and-drop a folder or file from the Finder into the terminal window.

The path of the file or folder will appear in the terminal. Press Enter to run the command and the file or folder will vanish. It’s still there — it’s just hidden, so the Finder won’t show it by default.

Unhiding the hidden files

If you want to unhide the hidden files then run the same command as you ran before but this time write “nohidden” instead of “hidden” as depicted below:

chflags nohidden

Or otherwise, if you remember the exact path you can write it in the terminal.

Use the left arrow key to go to the hidden part of the command, now change it to “nohidden” and press enter. The file will become unhidden and now you can access it normally.

In this way, you can unhide the files that you might have hidden earlier.

There is also an alternate way to hide files by renaming them to begin with “.” or period or character.

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