Your Mac has a secret. Thousands of them in fact, in the form of hidden files and folders lurking on its hard drive or SSD. Don’t worry, though. These files and folders are all supposed to be there. In fact, many of them are essential.
Many of these files are in your Mac’s main Library folder or in the ~/Library folder, which is in your User folder. Both these Library folders are hidden, but inside them are folders and files that hold things like preferences for apps.
In this article, we’ll tell you how you can view hidden files on your Mac and make your Library folder visible.
It seems like every day I search Google for the command to show hidden files on Mac OS X, not to mention Googling for the command to then hide those hidden files a few minutes later. Today I decided to make a short and easy to remember alias to speed up the process. Jun 08, 2016 Show Hidden Files Mac OS X El Capitan: Click “Finder” icon on your Mac dock. Open Terminal. Terminal is a utility that provides access to the OS X El Capitan operating system. It can be opened in one of two following ways: Select “Applications” on the left side, then on “Utilities“, and double-click on “Terminal“. Use Funter to show hidden files, switch hidden files visibility in Finder, hide files, copy, move or remove them on your Mac. With Funter, you can show hidden files or hide files with just one click. The application allows you also to find any file, including hidden ones, by its name. Free Download.
What are the hidden files on Mac?
The hidden files are a throwback to macOS’ Unix roots. In fact, the convention of naming them starting with a “.” comes from Unix. For that reason, you can’t use a “.” at the start of a regular file name, otherwise OS X will hide it.
The files themselves contain data like access rights and privileges for files and folders, application support files, and preferences.
There are a number of reasons files and folders are hidden. Mostly, though, it’s because they contain data critical to the smooth running of your Mac and that you shouldn’t interfere with. In addition, there’s no real reason for most users to see or access them. Also, if they were all visible, your Mac would look horribly cluttered.
![]() How to view hidden files on Mac
Before you make your Mac show hidden files, it’s important to remember they’ve been hidden for a reason. The data they contain could cause havoc if you delete or alter it and don’t know what you’re doing.
If your goal in viewing, for example ~/Library is so you can manually delete application support files for a program you’ve uninstalled, consider using a dedicated uninstaller like CleanMyMac X. That will make it easy to remove all the files associated with an application with one click. You can download CleanMyMac X for free here.
CleanMyMac X will also allow you to get rid of all the hidden files you no longer need. Many of these files are created and used then not needed anymore. They just sit there clogging up your hard drive. CleanMyMac X scans your Mac, identifies this system junk and allows you to quickly and easily get rid of it, potentially several gigabytes of disk space.
If you still want to view hidden files on your Mac, you need to go to the Finder and do the following:
How to view your Mac’s ~/Library folder
There are a couple of methods for making your ~/Library folder visible. Here’s the simplest:
Alternatively, do this to view your Library folder:
With both these methods, your Library folder will disappear again when you close the Finder window. It’s easy enough to run through the steps above again to make it visible again when you need to, but if you want it permanently accessible, there are a couple of ways to do it.
The quickest is to drag the Library folder to the Finder’s sidebar. That will create a shortcut to it that will persist. If you want to keep ~/Library visible but don’t want it clogging up the sidebar in Finder windows, do this:
How to make macOS show hidden files using Terminal
If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can use the Terminal command line interface to view hidden files and folders. Here’s how to do it:
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To hide the files again, repeat the above steps, but replace ‘true’ with ‘false’ at the end of step 2.
How to hide any file or folder using TerminalHidden Files Mac Delete
Now that you know how to view hidden files and folders on your Mac, you may be wondering how you can hide other files or folders, to keep them away from prying eyes. There are a number of third-party applications and utilities that offer to do this for you, but you can do it yourself in Terminal, like this:
Hidden File Apps For Mac Windows 7
The file or folder you dragged onto the Terminal window will now be hidden. To see it again, use one of the methods described above to see hidden files.
To make the file visible permanently again, use the steps above, but in step 2 type: chflags nohidden
As you can see, viewing hidden files and folders on your Mac is very straightforward. There are a number of ways to do it, and you can make them visible temporarily or permanently.
However, just because you can view hidden files, doesn’t mean you should — the files are usually hidden because accidentally deleting them or altering them could cause chaos on your Mac. So, while it’s fine to have a peek, don’t do anything with the hidden files unless you know what you’re doing.
If you want to declutter your Mac or uninstall applications, use a dedicated application like CleanMyMac X. It will safely remove all useless files, add-ons, broken login items, caches, large and old files you didn't know about. Most likely, you won't even need to look for hidden files — CleanMyMac will do all the job for you.
Hidden File Apps For Mac Download
We also showed that many of those files are stored in Library folders, including the one in your User folder, ~/Library. That folder is hidden by default, but you can view it or make it permanently visible using the techniques described above.
Apr 08, 2019 Unfortunately, I’m one of those customers and there is no easy fix. “A critical software update is required for your Mac, but a network issue was encountered while installing this update. Jan 20, 2019 A critical software update is required for your Mac, but an error was encountered while installing this update. Your mac can't be used until this update. MacOS High Sierra “Critical Update”. Eventually, it booted into the Wi-Fi connection menu and said: “A critical software update is required for your Mac.”. Using Reddit. Help Reddit App Reddit coins Reddit premium Reddit gifts Communities Top Posts. Terms Content policy. A critical software update is required for your mac reddit. Dec 29, 2019 A Critical Software Update is Required for Your Mac Here’s the situation: when you turn on your MacBook, even before it gets to your desktop, you’ll get the following message. A critical software update is required for your Mac. To install this update you need to connect to a network. Dec 26, 2018 Mac users have recently begun to run into an issue that prevents them from using MacOS effectively: When they try to turn their Macs on, they get a message that says.
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