Hidden File or Folder under Finder on Mac OS X

A user reported that a folder he created on a share folder could not be seen by other users. I tried it on several different computers connected to the same shared folder. I could not see the folder that the user created using Finder. I then tried Terminal and issued this command

admin$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 admin staff 0 Dec 13 17:16 test-file.txt
drwxr-xr-x@ 2 admin staff 68 Dec 13 17:21 test-folder

The test-folder is the one that’s invisible under Finder. Notice the extra @ for the test-folder. This means that there are extra attribute keys and sizes for it. Using the command ls -l@ reveals the extra info.

admin$ ls -l@
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 admin staff 0 Dec 13 17:16 test-file.txt
drwxr-xr-x@ 2 admin staff 68 Dec 13 17:21 test-folder
      com.apple.FinderInfo 32

For some reason, the folder was created with com.apple.FinderInfo 32 . This tells Finder that this folder is hidden- that’s why other people could not see it. To un-hide this folder, use this command:

chflags nohidden test-folder

Similarly, if you want to hide a file or a folder, use this command:

chflags hidden file-name