A Web Developer’s Blog Highlighting Open Source and OS X

In web development on the Apache web server, a common configuration file used in nearly every site we build is the .htaccess file. But in OS X, you can’t see it in the Finder – hidden files (files which start with a dot “.”) are unavailable unless you use the Unix command line. I did some digging around and found a way to enable hidden files in the Finder – which, ironically involves using the command line to get there.

Open the Terminal application (or, I much prefer iTerm) and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
and after hitting return, follow it up with
killall Finder
which restarts the Finder and shows all files.

To revert back to hiding those files, simply run the same command above again but change TRUE to FALSE