A Miscellany of Mystifying Tiger Problems By Francine Schwieder

What Should Be Invisible Isn't

And then there is the opposite problem, when some things that ought to be invisible instead can be plainly seen. There are two variants: things that show up on your Mac, and things that show up from the Mac on a PC.

After a Restore: etc, tmp and var

You've done a restore from your clone, and suddenly you see three mysterious files that seem to be aliases. They are called etc, tmp and var and you wonder what in the world they are and whether you can just trash them.

What they are, are system files, and for the sake of all that is UNIX holy do not do anything to them. They are absolutely necessary for the system to run. There are several different ways to make them invisible again: Apple's official way is this:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301677

Makes me feel faint. There is a simpler way which I prefer, and a way using the Terminal, which makes many Mac users feel faint.

My way is to launch TextEdit, go to Format and make the document Plain Text, then type etc, hit return, tmp , return, and var. You will have this list:

etc
tmp
var

Go to Save, make sure the box to add the extension is NOT checked, name the file .hidden and save at the root level of your drive (the same level that Applications and System are on). You will get a dialog saying that dot files are not nice and will become invisible (words to that effect anyway). Click the button that says "Use ." and then restart the Finder, or log out and back in, or just restart the computer.

The .hidden file tells Finder not to display anything that is listed in the .hidden file in the Finder window for the drive. This was the method that was used in earlier versions of OS X, but was changed in Tiger. However, the Finder will still read a .hidden file on the drive if one is present. Also, while the owner/permissions in Panther for the .hidden file are owner:root and group:wheel, with read permissions only for owner, group and others, the .hidden file you create in Tiger with TextEdit will have you as owner and group, and gives you write permissions as well as read. This turns out to be irrelevant. The only thing necessary in terms of permissions for this file to work is that it can be read by everyone, which it can. If the Finder can read it, it can act upon the contents. It doesn't matter that you own the file and can write to it. Repairing permissions won't change this either, because since the file doesn't normally exist in Tiger, there are no permissions assigned for it in the files Disk Utility uses to tidy up. If this bothers you I suppose you could use the Terminal or something like BatChmod to change them. I haven't bothered.

You Can See All Sorts of Files You Never Saw Before

There are a number of utilities that can turn on the Show Hidden Files option in the Finder. If you click the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) button in the utility and restart you will begin seeing files named things like .DS_Store, .vol, the aforementioned etc, tmp, var, plus usr, bin, and so on. An astonishing number of things actually. Apple hides this stuff for a reason, touch them at your peril! If you suddenly see these things and have been using a third party utility to run the periodic UNIX jobs or clean caches, you probably accidently activated the Show Invisibles. Whatever the utility you used was, launch it and figure out what you toggled on, and toggle it off. If you can't figure it out, you can use a Terminal command to turn off the option.

Launch Terminal from your utilities folder and type this:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean false;killall Finder

Hit return, the Finder will restart and you will no longer see all the normally invisible stuff. Oh, and when the option is on, not only do you see things you would just as soon not see, but EVERYTHING you see looks weird, sort of a pale shadow of its normal self. Pre-Tiger when you enabled the show invisibles only the normally hidden things had that gray look. This makes having invisibles visible especially annoying.

Return to Index