Using a Period to Hide Files

[insomniac321123]

I may be wrong, but do I remember being able to hide files in earlier versions of Mac OS X by renaming them with a period in front of the file name? This made it easy to hide a file and then find it again by showing hidden files from the finder menu bar.

I tried to do this in Lion but I got an error saying that files beginning with a period were reserved for the system. Is that new?

 

[Intell]

I can't do it in Snow Leopard or Leopard.

 

[insomniac321123]

Hmm, I must have dreamed it then. Thanks for testing it for me.

 

[RWil85]

odd you posted this..

just read somewhere that I can do this on my Droid X phone..seems to me there should have to be a way to do it in a Mac OS then..hmm.

 

[insomniac321123]

I did some looking on the internet and I found that you can use this code in terminal to do it:

chflags hidden file.dmg

Going into terminal every time I want to open my file is little more work than its worth to me though.

 

[maflynn]

Its a unix convention, by placing a period in the beginning, it will be by default hidden.

Whether OSX allows you to do that in the GUI is another matter

 

[iVoid]

Yeah, you have to use terminal to add a period or something like PathFinder or Kilometer.

 

[podsorcerer09]

Have you tried adding the period in front from the "Get Info" window instead of the standard Finder window. Sometimes the Get Info window has more power over file naming than Finder does. Using chflags might be your best bet otherwise