visible
adjective:
1. being often in the public eye; "a visible public figure"
2. obvious to the eye; "a visible change of expression"
The good news is, I just got a brand new MacBook Pro. It's a beautiful laptop.
The bad news is trying to get it set upo work just like my old Powerbook, which I had been using for so long. Now, the Mac is way ahead of Windows on this front. They have a beautiful tool which brings over all your files and applications and preferences. For all the Mac apps it is flawless. Even your desktop icons come across all in the right place!
It unfortunately, however, does nothing on the unix side. And since I have customized my unix stuff a bit, this can prove to be a bit of a pain. I had to do some research to even remember how to do some of the small customizations I had put in. The results of one of those researches is this post.
I really like to see some of my unix folders in Finder. It's nice to be able to copy folders over to the unix side from the Finder and also just to browse. Many sites will show you the secret code to make all files in the Finder visible,
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
but that's no good for me because that's way too many files. I want something where I can selectively turn on or off visibility on files or folders.
To do this you need to install XCode, it's a free download from the Apple Website.
With XCode, you get 2 tools that let you change the special Apple permissions on files and folders, GetFileInfo and SetFile. Why they not symetrically named is a mystery to me, but there you have it.
I like to have /usr visible in Finder, let's see how you would do that.
Start Terminal and "cd \"
Then, type
/Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo usr"
You should see the following
directory: "/usr"
attributes: aVbstclinmedz
created: 04/07/2006 14:47:33
modified: 10/01/2006 21:35:01
That uppercase "V" you see in the attributes line means invisible to Finder. We want to change it to a lowercase "v". Here's the command:
sudo /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v usr
You need to sudo because root owns /usr
If we run our GetFileInfo again we see:
directory: "/usr"
attributes: avbstclinmedz
created: 04/07/2006 14:47:33
modified: 10/01/2006 21:35:01
You can now relaunch the Finder and click on "Macintosh HD" your /usr folder should be visible in the finder.
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