Showing Hidden Files on OS X and Time Machine
Not Perl related, but I suspect some folks may appreciate this.
Today after a nasty mistake on the command line involving find and rm, I discovered that I deleted a number of files I didn't mean to delete, including some hidden files. Oops! I opened my Time Machine backup, only to discover that it doesn't show hidden files. However, it turns out that you can use that to show hidden files so long as your main system shows hidden files. I'm using OS X Mavericks, so I dropped the following bash script into my bin folder and named it togglehidden. Running this from the command line will toggle showing hidden files in the Finder on or off.
#!/bin/bash
is_shown=$(defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles)
if [ $is_shown != "TRUE" ]; then
echo Showing hidden files
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
else
echo Hiding hidden files
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
fi
killall Finder
Use at your own risk!
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For me, anything involving find, xargs and rm gets an echo in front of the rm first!
I always have ShowAllFiles on, because I need to see and edit
.git .gitignore .htaccess .perlcriticrc .perltidyrc
and others. Also I want to see the crap which OSX, Windows and (most) Linux desktop environments (DE) leave in directories. It's a shame for Apple that you need a script for switching this mode. Nearly every other DE let you switch this in the menue 'View'.
BTW: Because of the courious treatment of filenames in OSX special care should be taken (keywords: Case Conservation, Escaping) .