In MAC OS X, the Macintosh HD points to the root directory and opening it in Finder, by default, will not show all the content. I don’t know why MAC OS creators took this decision, but my investigation concluded their decision was based on the idea to “reduce the visual clutter and enhances simplicity”. Or maybe they had no reason for doing so and just wanted to keep the complexity simple.
However, as an application developer I like to have the full control of my own laptop. Therefore I am choosing to see the hidden files which are present on my hard disk. On a MAC OS, these will be revealed by running the following command in Terminal:
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defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE |
Another way achieve this behavior is to use a keyboard shortcut. Pressing and holding command + shift + period (when in finder) will show or hide the hidden files and folder.