Making a folder/dir hidden to Windows through OS X

[gumbyx84]

Hey all. I'm trying to find an way to hide folders on a FAT32 file system in a Win* environment. Basically, the device I have will not show files and folders/directories in its menus if they are marked as hidden in Windows. I want to find a way to do this in OS X without having to boot in XP all the time. Anyone know how?

 

[maflynn]

The quickest ways is to put a . in front of the name.

.myfolder

There's also the invisible file attribute that can be set by the terminal or products like pathfinder.

As a rule the finder hides invisible files/folders - well duh! and so you cannot change the attribute that you cannot see.

 

[gumbyx84]

.... As I said, I need to apply the hidden tag/flag from Windows on a file. .files and folders might work, but I cant use . as the files need to have specific names.

 

[maflynn]

Sorry - misread your post.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Strangely enough, there's a flag you can set to make a file hidden in Mac OS X (but you can't set or unset it from Finder) - the hidden flag. Windows honors this flag's value, if it finds it set on a file coming from Mac OS X. The command needed in the Terminal is chflags. Its usage is fairly straightforward: to set a flag for a file, you specify the flag name and the file name as arguments, in that order. To clear a flag, prefix no to the flag name.

An example may help clarify things:

chflags hide ~/Sites/index.html

This hides the index.html file from the Finder, as well as Open/Save dialogs.
To clear that flag on the same file:

chflags nohide ~/Sites/index.html

 

[gumbyx84]

Thanks for the tip wrldwzrd89. I will give it a try later today.