After dealing with a lot of .htaccess files in connection with several websites. If you uncompress a .zip or transfer the file from a web server to your desktop via FTP, the file never shows up. Thus making very difficult to edit.
A file that starts with a period is one of the files that OS X hides by default so that you don’t accidentally delete and or alter it thus messing up your file system. However, there could be times that you want access to those hidden mac files. Strangely Apple has not made easy as toggling a menu item in the Finder.
Here is a simple and free solution for you to follow the following few steps. After writing a line or two of code you’ll be able to use Apple’s Automator software to create a plugin that you can use to toggle the view of hidden files from within Finder.
After opening Automator, select Automator from within the Applications Library on the left-hand side. You’ll now see a number of different built-in actions that are available to the Automator application.
Select Run Shell Script from the list of available actions, and drag it into your workflow.
Type (or paste in) the following code into the Run Shell Script text box:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUEkillall Finder
