Hiding Files

L33tdawg: This article first appeared over at our affiliates site Underground Mac. The original article can be found here.

By: [in]visible

I'm writing this assuming you know the basics of using Terminal.
This paper is for those who have nosey brothers, sisters, parents and or if you can't trust what your friend is going to do on your computer when you go to use the restroom.

What are we going to do?
Choosing a good place for the hidden folder, creating it, and opening it.

How To:

We are going to create a folder that you cannot see unless your in terminal and you type ls -a. But first we need to find a good place to put just incase someone is actually knows what there doing. I would probably put it somewhere in the home directory like the Movies, Music, Sites, or Documents folder. Once you pick one of these we move on the to the next step.

Now that you have selected the folder, we need to create a hidden folder. You can do this with a simple mkdir command in Terminal. I'll put making my hidden folder in Sites:

[My-Computer:~] inviz% mkdir ~/Sites/.hidden

Now you would probably want to call it something less obvious than ".hidden" like downloads, or something uninteresting.
Now you may have noticed that little "." infront of the word hidden. These kind of folders can not be seen by a normal ls command without certain arguments and can not be seen by someone browsing through your folders.

Now that you have your hidden folder created, do an ls -a in the directory where you made your folder just to make sure it's named right.

[My-Computer:~] inviz% cd ~/Sites
[My-Computer:~/Sites] inviz% ls -a
.hiddenN3KMy site
Index.htmlmain.htmlcontact.html

All your looking for is the ".hidden" folder just to make sure it's there. Now we need to open it.

[My-Computer:~/Sites] inviz% open .hidden

Now a window in the Finder should open. And you can put all your pr0n in there and whatever else you don't want your nosey friends to see.

For future reference:

If you want to open it again "open .hidden" will not always work unless your in the same directory. Since my ".hidden" folder was in directory "~/Sites" I have to type:

[My-Computer:~] inviz% open ~/Sites/.hidden"

Now if you want to delete the folder along with the contents just type:

[My-Computer:~] inviz% rm -rf ~/Sites/.hidden

Be VERY CAREFUL while using the rm command. If you do it wrong you might delete something that you really need and you wont be able to get it back.

1.) Reducing "Human Factor" Mistakes - Dancho Danchev
2.) Virtual File System - /proc - Danny “Dr.T”
3.) Hiding Files - [in]visible
4.) Better Living Through Mod Security - L33tdawg
5.) Guide to ARP Spoofing - Barfbag
6.) SMOKE="gentoo" - mel
7.) Nessus - Doing more with Less - christian