Showing Hidden Files in macOS

Quick little article.  I had a debacle with my Catalina and Mail.app.  I do NOT use Outlook, mostly because Micro$oft does not allow you to use your Apple Contacts as a source for Outlook Contacts (At least the last time I checked).  I called Apple “support” which is usually useless and they had me delete the com.apple.mail which I did.  Then commenced to download all my email AGAIN.  The problem was that the folder was sitting in my Trash and I could not delete it because it said it was in use.

Long story short, I had to boot up in recovery mode, decrypt & mount my partition, then delete the folder manually with rf commands.  Apple had long disconnected, sadly.  At any rate, I wanted to see if maybe there was some other hidden files in the com.apple.mail folder that was not allowing me to delete the file.  Here is the command to SHOW the hidden files (and if you are like me, the hidden files are esthetically annoying) and how to hide them again.

Show Them

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles Yes

Hide Them

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles No

 

In case you are wondering, I rebooted and everything was just peachy.  It was just Catalina with some separation anxiety with some files.

Quick Shortcut

You can also hit ⌘ ⇧ .   (Command – Shift – Period)

Disclaimer:  I Do not know who this kid is on the Feature Picture, but since her face is covered, Ill run with it. 🙂