Originally Posted by nfoav8or

I don't know if this will help someone out there so I'll post it as an add-on here...

I've been trying to get the "Microsoft User Data" folder to be hidden but still there so I get it out of my Documents folder in the Dock. (purely aesthetics for me)

To toggle the invisibility bit of a single file or folder you’ll need Apple's Xcode Tools software, specifically a Unix program called SetFile. It can be found in the /Developer/Tools directory.

Launch Terminal.
Remember to change "YourHomeDirectory" to match your system and to not put a "/" at the end of the code as this will only set the contents of the folder to be invisible and not the folder itself.

After pressing Return/Enter, this immediately enables the invisibility bit although the file will not actually turn invisible until the Finder is relaunched... to make it invisible in the Dock you need to restart the dock as well. I use MainMenu for this as it allows me to do both very quickly via a few clicks.

To reverse directions with SetFile, you do almost the same thing with the exception it needs to be a lower case v instead of an upper case V. This disables the invisible bit.


This probably is old news but I never bothered to look into the issue until now.. I've always used the ".hidden" method for all my other needs.