Hidden folders showing in Macintosh HD

[tmt345]

I just had to reinstall Mac OS X Leopard and when I clicked on Macintosh HD I noticed many folders like these showed up:

bin
cores
etc
private
sbin
tmp
usr
var

I've reinstalled Mac OS X Leopard a couple times before and this has happened several times when I did. I'm just sick of having to reinstall because of this so yeah...

Oh, and I tried the hidden folders command thing in the terminal but that didn't work.

 

[angelwatt]

Can you show what command you gave in Terminal to attempt to hide hidden files? Some places on the Internet give incorrect information.

You can also try deleting the Finder preference file to see if that helps. It's located at,

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

where ~ represents your home directory.

 

[tmt345]

Can you show what command you gave in Terminal to attempt to hide hidden files? Some places on the Internet give incorrect information.

You can also try deleting the Finder preference file to see if that helps. It's located at,

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

where ~ represents your home directory.

I got the command from here:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2274100_hidden-files-mac-os-x.html

I did a little research and some people were having this problem too but they never gave instructions on how to fix it:

https://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-550164.html
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/377553/
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1305416

The command you gave me said "permission denied", so then I tried the "su" command I use in Linux sometimes but it responded "sorry". I rarely use the terminal so I don't really know what I'm doing!

 

[angelwatt]

I did a little research and some people were having this problem too but they never gave instructions on how to fix it:

I see the commands they give, so they did provide their solutions. See post 11 on that second link. It gave a list of commands to use. Note though, that it says you have to have the Developer Tools installed (located on install disc), though I can't confirm its needed as I already have it installed.

 

[tmt345]

Sorry, I meant they didn't give instructions that I understood. What is developer tools, X11? How do I run that script, it doesn't make any sense to me.

EDIT: So I just have to get dev tools and run those lines 1 by 1 in the terminal?

 

[angelwatt]

Sorry, I meant they didn't give instructions that I understood. What is developer tools, X11? How do I run that script, it doesn't make any sense to me.

Ah, gotcha. The X11 part is just a windowing environment for Unix. Don't worry about it right now. The Developer Tools are a set of applications that allow developers to program applications for Mac. The commands given in that post seem to use one of those tools.

The commands are given from a Terminal window (located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal). So for those commands you would simply enter each line and hit return for each one. It will likely ask for your password after the first command because the line is prefixed with "sudo" which means you're doing a admin task. Give that a go and see how far you get.

Edit: To install Developer Tools

OS 10.5 - Insert your Leopard DVD and when the window opens double-click Optional Installs folder, open XcodeTools folder, and finally double-click XcodeTools.mpkg to install it.

 

[tmt345]

EDIT: Thanks I'll post back in 20 minutes (it takes 15 minutes to install) and tell what happened.

 

[tmt345]

Ok, I got rid of most of the files, but the little guide said to delete

/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices*

how do I delete those files?

 

[angelwatt]

Ok, I got rid of most of the files, but the little guide said to delete

/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices*

how do I delete those files?

Use the command,

sudo rm -f /Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices*

In case you didn't see the note in that other thread, some of the effects from the command may not be apparent until after a reboot.

 

[tmt345]

Everything worked! Thanks for your help! Is there any karma system or something in the MacRumors Forums?

 

[angelwatt]

Everything worked! Thanks for your help! Is there any karma system or something in the MacRumors Forums?

Cool, glad that worked for you. Karma is self sustaining through each post.