Showing hidden files can be somewhat of a pain in Mac OS X. I’ve come up with a number of ways to make it easier for myself.

The simplest, most direct way of doing this is a command in the Terminal. One way is to navigate to the appropriate directory in Terminal and type ls -lha. Alternatively, you can type ls -lha <path/to/directory>. This will give you a list of all the hidden files for that directory. But maybe you aren’t proficient with Terminal commands and/or you need to do some file manipulation and/or you don’t want to use the CLI.

Much like my post Hide Desktop Icons on Mac, I’ve created a little script I call hidden that automatically shows and hides hidden files.

#!/bin/bash

# checks file visibility and stores value in a variable
isVisible="$(defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles)"

# toggle file visibility based on variable
if [ "$isVisible" = 1 ]; then
	defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false
else
	defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
fi

# force changes by restarting Finder
killall Finder

Paste that code into a text editor, save it to a directory in your $PATH and make it executable (chmod 755 <filename>).

Two other alternatives I’ve stumbled upon are HideSwitch and Secrets Prefpane (at the time of this post the site was down. Get it at MacUpdate instead.) HideSwitch is just a simple mini-app with two buttons to hide and show hidden files. Secrets Prefpane is a just that: a button that shows up as a system preference and turns into a prefpane once clicked. However Secrets is quite powerful and can do a lot more than just show and hide files. Secrets includes a variety of features, such as:

• Selecting the format and destination folder of saved screenshots
• Changing the login window desktop picture
• Changing Dock effects
• Seeing the contents of folders when QuickLooking (I don’t think this works on Lion)
• Enabling the debug menu in iCal

Those are just a few that I’ve found useful and interesting. Since it’s free, you may want to download it and check it out. Might have a feature you’ve been dying to have. Secrets also taps into many of the preferences of your other programs such as Adium, iTunes, Cyberduck, Skype, Preview, Transmission, etc.