All of a sudden on my Macbook Pro, I am seeing a lot of files that begin with "." in Finder. For example in my Home, I see.bash_history, .CFUserTextEncoding, .config, .cups, .DS_Store, .parallels_settings, .smb, .ssh and .Trash.

I know these are relative links and I don't want to delete them, but I would like to hide them if possible. I do not know why they all of a sudden started showing up. I didn't change anything to my computer that I know of recently.

Any ideas?

Originally Posted by BrianS

All of a sudden on my Macbook Pro, I am seeing a lot of files that begin with "." in Finder. For example in my Home, I see.bash_history, .CFUserTextEncoding, .config, .cups, .DS_Store, .parallels_settings, .smb, .ssh and .Trash.

I know these are relative links and I don't want to delete them, but I would like to hide them if possible. I do not know why they all of a sudden started showing up. I didn't change anything to my computer that I know of recently.

Any ideas?

Dont know how you made that one happening, some tools allow to show all hidden files. They are not relative links, those are just hidden files.

Open Terminal (in Applications > Utilities), then type or better copy the two lines of code:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

Attn: upper/lower case matters!

All hidden files will be invisible again. if you set TRUE instead of FALSE in the first line of code the hidden files will be visible again.

Files starting with a dot (.config, .cups, etc) should be hidden. To tell the Finder not to show them:

- Open a Terminal Window.
- From Terminal, execute: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
- Execute also: killall Finder. It will restart the finder.

After that, that files should be hidden.

Thank you so much. Yeah, I have know clue how that happened, I just know it did. It is much appreciated.