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g-boac

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 7, 2007
291
1
Good evening - one of the ways that I'm enjoying my Mac and Mac OS are by learning unix. To this end, I had a question:

what's the difference between a file or directory that you hide using the chflags command vs. hiding by renaming it with a leading .period?

What spurs my question is when I restored my Mac from a Time Machine backup, I had a /Private folder visible in my root directory. Did a quick web search, and saw that the way to fix this was by running a sudo chflags command to set a "hidden" flag on the folder. So was wondering fundamentally what the difference is (if any) between using a chflags hidden command and a period.

Thanks for any insight anyone can provide, and apologies in advance for the advanced/limited interest nature of the question.

cheers, and thanks!
Mark
 
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