Your Mac has a secret. Thousands of them in fact, in the form of hidden files and folders lurking on its hard drive or SSD. Don’t worry, though. These files and folders are all supposed to be there. In fact, many of them are essential.
Many of these files are in your Mac’s main Library folder or in the ~/Library folder, which is in your User folder. Both these Library folders are hidden, but inside them are folders and files that hold things like preferences for apps.
In this article, we’ll tell you how you can view hidden files on your Mac and make your Library folder visible.
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What are the hidden files on Mac?
The hidden files are a throwback to macOS’ Unix roots. In fact, the convention of naming them starting with a “.” comes from Unix. For that reason, you can’t use a “.” at the start of a regular file name, otherwise OS X will hide it.
The files themselves contain data like access rights and privileges for files and folders, application support files, and preferences.
May 01, 2019 All Mac systems contain hidden files and folders. These are often preceded by a full stop or a slash, and are kept out of sight of the user either to prevent them from being deleted because they. Jun 14, 2011 Mac OS X allows you to show or hide file extensions for individual files or display extensions for all files. Individual Files. If you want to show or hide an extension for a single file, first open the file's information window. You can do this by selecting the. Feb 25, 2009 Show Hidden Files & Folders on a Mac Temporarily with Terminal. Another way to quickly see hidden files in OS X is by using the ls command within the Terminal, at the command line type the following: ls -a. The -a flag tells the ls (list) command to show all contents, including hidden files. Jul 02, 2020 How to Show Hidden Files and Folders on a Mac. This wikiHow teaches you how to view and unhide hidden files and folders on Mac OS X by using the Terminal app. If you don't have any hidden folders on your Mac, you can make one. After all, these files are hidden for a reason! See hidden files on Mac via Finder. As mentioned above, it doesn’t take much to make the hidden files on your Mac visible. In fact, you can check out all of the hidden files on your Mac by following just three easy steps: In Finder, open up your Macintosh HD folder; Press Command+Shift+Dot. How To Show All Files on the Mac. There are two ways to show the hidden files on your Mac. First, the hard way: Using the Terminal. 'Terminal' is a program that advanced users typically use. If you click Go in the apple menu bar (finder), and then you click Utilities, you will come to a folder that has the Terminal application. Start Terminal. Show all files in the Finder. Today's Best Tech Deals. Picked by Macworld's Editors. When it does, you’ll find that you can now see every single file and folder on your Mac.
There are a number of reasons files and folders are hidden. Mostly, though, it’s because they contain data critical to the smooth running of your Mac and that you shouldn’t interfere with. In addition, there’s no real reason for most users to see or access them. Also, if they were all visible, your Mac would look horribly cluttered.
How to view hidden files on Mac
Before you make your Mac show hidden files, it’s important to remember they’ve been hidden for a reason. The data they contain could cause havoc if you delete or alter it and don’t know what you’re doing.
If your goal in viewing, for example ~/Library is so you can manually delete application support files for a program you’ve uninstalled, consider using a dedicated uninstaller like CleanMyMac X. That will make it easy to remove all the files associated with an application with one click. You can download CleanMyMac X for free here.
CleanMyMac X will also allow you to get rid of all the hidden files you no longer need. Many of these files are created and used then not needed anymore. They just sit there clogging up your hard drive. CleanMyMac X scans your Mac, identifies this system junk and allows you to quickly and easily get rid of it, potentially several gigabytes of disk space.
If you still want to view hidden files on your Mac, you need to go to the Finder and do the following:
- Open a new Finder window and click on the name of your Mac under ‘Devices’ in the sidebar.
- Click on Macintosh HD, or whatever you’ve called your startup drive if you’ve renamed it.
- Press Command-Shift-. (period). You should now see lots of files and folders who’s name starts with “.” become visible.
- To re-hide the files and folders, hold down Command-Shift-. again.
How to view your Mac’s ~/Library folder
There are a couple of methods for making your ~/Library folder visible. Here’s the simplest:
- Click on the Finder in the Dock.
- Open a new Finder window and navigate to your user folder (Tip: if it’s not in the sidebar, go to the Finder menu, choose Preferences, click Sidebar and check the box next to your Home folder)
- Click on the Go menu.
- Hold down the Option (Alt) key.
- You should see that in the dropdown menu, Library appears below Home. Click on it.
Alternatively, do this to view your Library folder:
- Click on the Finder in the Dock.
- Click on the Go menu and choose Go to Folder.
- In the window that opens, type “~/Library”
With both these methods, your Library folder will disappear again when you close the Finder window. It’s easy enough to run through the steps above again to make it visible again when you need to, but if you want it permanently accessible, there are a couple of ways to do it.
The quickest is to drag the Library folder to the Finder’s sidebar. That will create a shortcut to it that will persist. If you want to keep ~/Library visible but don’t want it clogging up the sidebar in Finder windows, do this:
- Click on the Finder in the Dock.
- Click on the View menu and choose Show View Options.
- Check the box labelled Show Library Folder at the bottom of the window.
How to make macOS show hidden files using Terminal
If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can use the Terminal command line interface to view hidden files and folders. Here’s how to do it:
- Open Terminal from the Utilities folder in Applications, or by searching for it using Spotlight. You can also use the Go menu in the Finder to go directly to the Utilities folder.
- Type, or copy and paste, this command: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles true
- Press Return
- Type: killall Finder
To hide the files again, repeat the above steps, but replace ‘true’ with ‘false’ at the end of step 2.
How to hide any file or folder using Terminal
Now that you know how to view hidden files and folders on your Mac, you may be wondering how you can hide other files or folders, to keep them away from prying eyes. There are a number of third-party applications and utilities that offer to do this for you, but you can do it yourself in Terminal, like this:
- Launch Terminal.
- Type: chflags hidden
- Press the spacebar.
- Drag the file or folder you want to hide from the Finder onto the Terminal window.
- You’ll see the path to the file or folder displayed in Terminal after the command you typed.
- Hit Return to execute the command.
The file or folder you dragged onto the Terminal window will now be hidden. To see it again, use one of the methods described above to see hidden files.
To make the file visible permanently again, use the steps above, but in step 2 type: chflags nohidden
As you can see, viewing hidden files and folders on your Mac is very straightforward. There are a number of ways to do it, and you can make them visible temporarily or permanently.
However, just because you can view hidden files, doesn’t mean you should — the files are usually hidden because accidentally deleting them or altering them could cause chaos on your Mac. So, while it’s fine to have a peek, don’t do anything with the hidden files unless you know what you’re doing.
If you want to declutter your Mac or uninstall applications, use a dedicated application like CleanMyMac X. It will safely remove all useless files, add-ons, broken login items, caches, large and old files you didn't know about. Most likely, you won't even need to look for hidden files — CleanMyMac will do all the job for you.
We also showed that many of those files are stored in Library folders, including the one in your User folder, ~/Library. That folder is hidden by default, but you can view it or make it permanently visible using the techniques described above.
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All My Files On Mac
A: (Click here for Windows instructions.)
Mac OS X allows you to show or hide file extensions for individual files or display extensions for all files.
Individual Files
If you want to show or hide an extension for a single file, first open the file's information window. You can do this by selecting the file and clicking 'Get Info' from the File menu. Or you may right-click (Control-click) the file and select 'Get Info' from the contextual menu that pops up. When the information window opens, it should look something like this:
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Notice the section towards the top of the window that says 'Name & Extension.'
If you would like to hide the file's extension, click the 'Hide extension' checkbox. If the file's extension is already hidden and you would like to show it, uncheck the 'Hide extension' box.
All Files
While Mac OS X hides file extensions by default, you can choose to show all file extensions, overriding the 'Hide extension' setting in the 'Get Info' window. To do this, click on the desktop to activate the Finder if is not already active and select 'Preferences...' from the Finder menu.
Then click on the Advanced tab in the Finder Preferences window as shown below:
Finally, check the 'Show all file extensions' box. All file extensions will now be visible both on the desktop and in open windows. If you want to hide file extensions again, simply open the Finder Preferences window and uncheck the box.
Updated: June 14, 2011