Show ALL Folders and Files in Finder on Mac OS X

As a web developer it’s often handy to be able to actually see all the unix related filesystem folder’s from within Finder. By default these are not displayed as a feature of the OS, but it’s quick and easy to turn this feature off to see all folders on the hard drive in Finder. to do so open terminal and enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Unfortunately, there’s still one more step to actually allow the setting change to take effect. You know have to “relaunch” Finder. This is done by pressing the “option” key while clicking on the Finder icon in the dock. Doing so will provide an extra option to relaunch Finder.

That’s it! Oh, and if you want to go back to the way it was before simply change the “YES” in the command above to a “NO” and relaunch Finder again.

Note: Mavericks requires a lowercase f in “finder”:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES