[Corys]

Hey All-
a friend of mine ran norton 4 on a partition that had OSX installed..In doing this, folders on the root level of the hard drive mainly ect,vol,usr,bin all became visible. I know they should be invisible..

would it hurt anything just to use a program like rbbroswer to set them invisible? or is there a better way of doing it?

BTW: the system works as it is, it just produces a lot of clutter on the HD, plus the opportunity to muck up a file in one of those folders

TIA

[KellyHogan]

You should be allowed to make any folder invisible from the Get Info box. Windows can do that, surely OSX should be able to. They should also become invisible over any network. Unix is about security so this should have been there.

[Wevah]

Check the .hidden file at the root level of the disk. This file contains the names (one per line) of all the directories and files at the root level that should be invisible in the Finder (other than those that start with a period.

[Nonsuch]

The thing is, once you've made it invisible, how do you make it visible again? This I think is why Apple hasn't implemented this in the Finder--if you can see invisible files in the Finder (which you would logically have to do in order to alter their (in)visibility via Get Info), well, what's the point of making them that way in the first place? Maybe the Finder could have a Show/Hide Invisibles toggle function, but it could scare the bejeezus out of newbies who suddenly confront all the clutter lurking in the heart of their computers. "What the hell is '.mach'? Should I delete it?"

Of course, Apple is likely to think that there's no reason to make invisibility a user-configurable function--the user directory structure effectively makes all of your files invisible to anyone who might want to go after them.

[KellyHogan]

Originally posted by Nonsuch:
<STRONG>The thing is, once you've made it invisible, how do you make it visible again? </STRONG>

In Windows you just go to an option that makes all files visible in order to find your personal invisible files along with invisible system files. Then after you retrieve your files you can make the system files invisible again. On OSX you would naturally type in your admin password in order to make files visible and invisible.

[malvolio]

You switch OS X's visibility/invisibility on and off by using a "defaults write..." command in the Terminal, or by using the freeware utility TinkerTool.

[seb2]

as wevah mentioned, for files at the root level, check your .hidden -- this only works for files at the root level, though.

if you have the dev tools installed, you can also set the visibility of files by typing this in the terminal:

to make them visible:
sudo /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v &lt;pathToFile&gt;

to make them invisible:
sudo /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V &lt;pathToFile&gt;

[Scrod]

Originally posted by Corys:
<STRONG>Hey All-
a friend of mine ran norton 4 on a partition that had OSX installed..In doing this, folders on the root level of the hard drive mainly ect,vol,usr,bin all became visible. I know they should be invisible..

would it hurt anything just to use a program like rbbroswer to set them invisible? or is there a better way of doing it?

BTW: the system works as it is, it just produces a lot of clutter on the HD, plus the opportunity to muck up a file in one of those folders

TIA</STRONG>

Your friend definitely should not have run Norton Utilities on that Mac OS X partition. He probably messed up a lot of other stuff as well. If those files that you mentioned are visible, that means that Norton Utilities has either deleted or renamed the .hidden file on the root level of the disk (because old versions of Norton don't like files with dots in front of their names). Files like usr, etc, and var in OS X actually DON'T have their invisible Finder flag set on them. They're made invisible automatically because their names are listed in /.hidden. So I suggest that your friend rename his "hidden" file ".hidden" if he still has it. Unfortunately that means that a lot of other files will probably be lost or screwed up as well, as many unix utilities will refer to specific files that happen to be named with a dot in front of them.
Hopefully this will be a lesson to your friend not to use anything lower than Norton Utilities 6 on Mac OS X.

[tinrib]

Originally posted by Wevah:
<STRONG>Check the .hidden file at the root level of the disk. This file contains the names (one per line) of all the directories and files at the root level that should be invisible in the Finder (other than those that start with a period.</STRONG>

i think this is where the problem lies. I can well imagine norton utilities f**king this up.

[Xeo]

Originally posted by Nonsuch:
<STRONG>"What the hell is '.mach'? Should I delete it?"</STRONG>

Yup, I have a friend who did that in OS 9 and then couldn't figure out why OS X wouldn't boot.

All because it was visible in the Finder.

[carver]

Contents of the .hidden folder:

automount
bin
cores
Desktop DB
Desktop DF
Desktop Folder
dev
etc
lost+found
mach
mach_kernel
mach.sym
private
sbin
tmp
Trash
usr
var
VM Storage
Volumes

The permissions should be set to read only: chmod 444
Owner set to: sudo chown root .hidden
Group set to: sudo chgrp wheel .hidden

Maybe of help....