“Yesterday, I showed how you could unhide the /Users folder in OS X 10.9.3, the latest update to OS X that was released yesterday. Yet many users, in comments, emails and on Twitter, have pointed out that their /Users folder is not hidden,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Kirkville. “Here, it’s hidden on both my Macs: a late 2011 Mac mini, and an early 2013 MacBook Pro.
“My guess, given that not everyone sees the /Users folder as hidden, is that this is a bug; one way or another,” McElhearn writes. “In other words, it should either not be hidden, or it should be hidden for everyone.”
Read more in the full article here.
“It’s easy to bring [the /Users folder] back though,” McElhearn explained yesterday. “Run the following command in Terminal:”
sudo chflags nohidden /Users
“Enter your administrator’s password when prompted, then press Return,” McElhearn wrote. “The /Users folder will be visible again.”
Read more in the full article here.
Unhidden until the next reboot, that is.
It was hidden on my 10.9.3 installation.
just incase somebody panics and gets nutzo I’m posting this higher there is a checkbox in the finder preferences to show the home folders (got that micfly? ) I found it years ago
its in the “sidebar” tab
It’s McFly, not Micfly.
Got that McFly!
ouch!
oh yes and by the way once your in the home user folder there is a checkbox to show the library in the apple menu “view” options (thats the one on top that starts with the apple ,file ,edit ,view for the really confused)
these are called “contextual menus ” a feature that limits your options to what you can do in the window your actually in!
I’m done now!
i see what you guys are bent out of shape the user folders are hidden on the actual root drive well theres an app for that called invisibles free at http://invisible.en.softonic.com/mac
gives you a menu toggle
How about we just wait until Apple fixes the problem?
its only a problem if you don’t believe in side menu bars.
the app works nicely (i just tried it) the way apple hides stuff is it puts a period in front of the file name the app temporarily removes them i am trying to see if it can see dongles! would that not be handy!
Hmmm…
Putting a period in front of file names is an old UNIX method of hiding files. Apple honors that system (for backwards compatibility) and also uses meta data to mark files with extended attributes (xattr).
One such attribute is “com.apple.FinderInfo” that is used by the Finder for various purposes.
One of the values stored in com.apple.FinderInfo is a flag called, “hidden”. If it is set then the Finder ignores the file and does not display it.
The chflags command used above, allows you to set and unset these various Finder flags.
Furthermore, the permissions of the /Users folder is screwed up and is set to full access by anyone. This definitely needs to be fixed by Apple.
You’re confused…
This issue has NOTHING to do with the your ~/Library folder being hidden… we all know it is hidden by default – for good reason.
This has to do with the /Users folder being hidden. This folder resides at the top level of your boot drive, which should contain the following items…
Applications
Library
System
Users
For some people (including me), “Users” is hidden from view, so all we see is…
Applications
Library
System
I have multiple users on my system, how am I supposed to be able to access other “Public” folders, or even the system wide “Shared” folder?
(and before anyone responds to this… I am an advanced user and know my way around OS X and UNIX)
So then we don’t need to tell you about Command-Shift-G?
Nope…
or typing, “open /users” in a terminal
cmd-shift-G
/Users/Shared
or ~USER2
etc..
I can’t imagine it should be hidden. If so, they would surely remove the public folders and dropbox. I doubt a lot of users actually know/use them, but if you can’t even see them they’re of no use at all.
/Users is NOT supposed to be hidden. This is a BUG.
That’s why I said that I can’t see that they would hide it. Doing so would negate the purpose of certain folders within user folders. Hence it must be a bug.
There’s another aspect to this bug:
On affected volumes, a Restart will make the /Users and /Users/Shared folders disappear again.
I am in search of a permanent fix without having to invoke the Terminal every damned time.
Reinstalling from a separate partition did not help. AND the unaffected partition decided to… be affected. I’ve dug around for permanent solutions and found none, only workarounds. I give up and hand this where it belongs: In Apple’s lap.
When at / Root, Library, System and Users folders are showing.
In the past, Library, ~/Library and System should be hidden.
My 27” iMac had it’s User folder hidden after the 10.9.3 update but my 17” MBP was okay. Go figure. I see another update soon to fix this?
My vintage iMac 24 had this issue, Users folder not visible, though my home folder shortcut in the sidebar would still take me there, there was no way to navigate up to the User folder – it is grayed out. Was about to freak out when I saw this. Thanks for the tip, saved me looking it up! Did Apple not QA this update? A lot of people are going to be upset!
Thanks Again MDN!
dmz
dmz
Apple has for years been ‘telegraphing” what’ coming next by these kinds of small, subtle changes in the OS.
The way I see it, is that the MacOS is headed to a file system that is invisible to the user, much like in iOS.
Apple, I think wrongly, assumes that files you create on your computer belong to them, and they will stop at nothing ’til ALL of your files are stored in their cloud… much like Google is now. Just look at iTunes, Numbers, and Pages for examples of Apple’s preferred storage location for my files…. all in the cloud.
When this change is finally implemented, this is where I’ll be looking for a new OS to use. My data and my documents belong to me, not Apple, and I want to be the one in charge of where I store them, not Apple.
Rather than borrow trouble, I prefer to relax and let events unfold for a while to see how OS X and iOS gradually evolve. Feel free to jump to wild conclusions based upon paranoia and lack of evidence, but don’t expect the majority of forum participants to blindly follow you down that path.
I grew up with a filesystem and I am used to it. But it has its own problems and places a lot of burden on the user to maintain it and make it useful. If the filesystem become “invisible” but works better for me, then great.
As far as file “ownership” goes, your paranoia is showing. In my opinion, Apple is a leading champion of user privacy and rights. Apple could collect and monetize your data like Google, but it does not. Not only that, buy Apple manages the iOS ecosystem to limit such abuses by third parties. How do Google and Android stack up in comparison? Good luck with finding a superior replacement OS. You will need it.
They do not think your files belong to them. They do however create the Finder and can choose to display whatever they think the user actually needs to see (and to protect the user from accidentally deleting stuff they shouldn’t). Traditional UNIX system have always used dot “.” files to hide them from directory listings. (In fact, if you do a “ls -la” in the terminal you’ll see a lot of crap in your home folder.) HFS just makes use of extended flags stored as meta data to do the same thing with regular files.
Why don’t you open the terminal and enter the following command, and tell me it wouldn’t confuse the hell out users?
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
If an inexperienced user saw all that crap in the folders, they would start cleaning it. Also, hiding folders eliminates one of the biggest issues with file systems – users can’t find where something was saved. This was the biggest problem I experienced with users when I worked in a computer lab.
Furthermore if you’re a super-user, you CAN store your files where ever you want… Maybe you should learn how to use a computer and its file system before whining about it?
I have used Macs for 16 years now, and the user’s folder has ALWAYS been visible in all of the eight Macs I have owned. After this new update, it is still there. Bug? Doubt it!
It is a bug. Every Mac publication out there is posting temporary workarounds that people can use until Apple fixes the problem. I have always expected better quality from Apple, what the heck is going on?
I guess it doesn’t matter to me. I’m the only user on my Mac and my Home Folder is always on the sidebar anyway. I can always drag and add the dropbox or any folder on the favorites column.
So Apple should supply a System Pref to allow a person with Admin rights to switch this at will.
Hiding things and forcing workarounds (and possible Terminal typing errors is not good.
Completely disagree… If you’re not advanced enough to correctly use the Terminal, then you’re not advanced enough to know what all those “other” files and folders are used for. And chances are you’re going to start deleting things you shouldn’t just to “clean” up your folders.
The hidden /Users folder is more than likely a bug… if it wasn’t they would’ve included an option just as they did in your home directory that allows to unhide the Library folder.
no way its a bug! its a preset that assumes one user so that any foray into the folders that you should be in is seamless and you can’t find the library unless you are seriously looking for it see my post below for the 100,000,000 dollar answer
You should use capitals and punctuation… I’m not sure what you’re trying to say?
Yes, there’s a checkbox in the your Home folder’s view options, that allows you to “Show Library Folder”.
If you are trying to say that there’s also a checkbox in the root folder’s view options that shows the /Users folder, then I would not be aware of that as I have always had multiple users on my Mac.
However, if that is the case, then it is still a bug, because my /Users folder is hidden even though I have multiple user accounts.
HELLOOOOOO!!!!!! theres a check box for it in the finder preferences !!!!
NOT related, as I prove below.
easy peezy lemon squeeze
This IS a bug.
I use the same computer for running both OS X Mavericks 10.9.x AND the AppleSeed betas. I updated both partitions with the same copy of the final COMBO version of the downloaded 10.9.3 update installer.
ONE partition is missing the /Users folder.
ONE partition is NOT.
I had repaired BOTH volumes, including permissions, before installation. The only substantial difference between them was that one was updated from 10.9.2 and the other was updated from a three-versions-back of 10.9.3 beta.
To test this BUG, I ran permissions repair on the partition WITH the bug. WRONG permissions were found on both the Users folder AND the Users/Shared folder.
Bad show Apple. Bad show. 🙄
Nice post…
Anyway you can check owner on Shared?
Is it supposed to be root/staff
Mine shows root/wheel and that doesn’t seem correct.
‘Sharing and Permissions’ for Shared should read:
system: Read & Write
wheel: Read & Write
everyone: Read & Write
This is the case on both unaffected volumes and bug repaired volumes.
Further messing around:
Fixing the broken permissions, which are oddly relevant to the problem, did NOT fix the problem.
Kirk’s terminal command worked to reveal /Users. I also used a variation to reveal /Users/Shared/
sudo chflags nohidden /Users/Shared/
Meanwhile, everything still works on the unaffected partition. Really odd bug.
BTW: The unaffected partition is the one where I had the beta of 10.9.3 running. I updated it from the OTHER partition using the COMBO updater. It’s possible this bug is instantiating during the restart part of the update, which the UNaffected partition did not have to perform.
Sheesh Apple.
Kirk already knew about the other problem with this bug: It reoccurs with EVERY Restart. That really sucks bad. I’m in search of the perfect permanent fix. Meanwhile:
If you check out Kirk’s source article, he’s added three updates about at least working around this bug. Quoting, here is one of them:
It turns out that, after running the above command, and restarting your Mac, the /Users folder becomes hidden again. To ensure the visibility of the /Users folder after restarts, you can create an AppleScript applet, and set it to run when you log in to your Mac. Use the following code:
tell application “Terminal”
do shell script “chflags nohidden /Users” password “yourpassword” with administrator privileges
end tell
Replace “your password” with your user password. Save this as an application, and add it to your login items in System Preferences > Accounts.
Obviously, this is a kludge. I’m going to take a clue from my results and RE- update my affected partition from the UNaffected system using the Combo update, again foregoing the Restart process, and see if that solves it. More later!
There is permanent fix for this… the login window has a hook built in… you can set it to run a unix script as root whenever you login. This works whether you auto login or not.
I created the following script…
#!/bin/sh
chflags nohidden /Users /Users/Shared
chmod 755 /Users
chmod +t /Users/Shared
saved it as “.fix” in my home directory, then in the terminal…
$ chmod 755 .fix
$ sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook “/Users/mjtomlin/.fix”
Presto!
Thanks Michael. I posted a similar, possibly more easy workaround below. It was posted at Kirk’s blog. I’ve run through it and it works.
I can’t see the /Users folder, but I’m not an adminstrator.
Has anyone got an admin account and have the issue?
Yes.
This Works. It’s a permanent workaround the solves the bad permissions problem behind this bug. It was provided by David Helms over at Kirk McElhearn’s Kirkville blog. It was taken from a discussion over at Apple’s support board. I’ve run through the procedure successfully. This is for folks already comfortable with the CLI (Terminal commands) including path statements. If you are not, please do not try this.
– – – –
David Helms says:
05/16/2014 at 9:42 pm
After browsing several websites today, the bug does indeed appear to be connected to iTunes 11.2 AND Find My Mac being “on”. So it appears the cause doesn’t really involve the 10.9.3 update directly.
With that being said here is the permanent fix that I have tried on my system and it did indeed work for me (sourced originally from somewhere on the Apple discussion blogs):
Start your computer with Alt + CMD + P + R in order to do a PRAM reset
Then start your computer with CMD + R for recovery partition boot
Launch Disk Utility and repair permissions. Quit Disk Utility and open Terminal (Utilities -> Terminal) and type:
cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD (or the name of your partition)
chmod 755 Users
chmod 755 Users/Shared
chflags nohidden Users
chflags nohidden Users/Shared
Quit and reboot to the normal Macintosh HD (or whatever the name of your partition). The fix will survive restarts. One poster recommended a value of 1777 for the Users/Shared folder. I don’t know enough about the file flags to know which is the preferable value, but 755 seemed to work for me.
I read that workaround… looks good, except it should be
$ chmod 1777 /Users/Shared
I should explain why…
The 777 means everyone can read and write to the folder, this is a must since that’s the point of a folder for sharing files.
The 1 is to set the “sticky” bit. In OS X if a folder has a sticky bit set it limits file deletion to the owner of the file (the user that put it in the shared folder) and to the system administrator.
I attempted at one point to study permissions. I even bought a book on it. Then I found the book messed it up! So I wrote the author, then gave up on it. The author gave up too. I really should give it another go as it is such an incredibly cryptic art.
Thanks Michael.
Final permissions, as seen from Get Info, after Michael’s correction:
Users
system: Read & Write
admin: Read only
everyone: Read only
Users/Shared
system: Read & Write
wheel: Read & Write
everyone: Read & Write
I hope this helps.
Looks like Apple released an update for iTunes to make it visible again. Umm ok.
I did both updates at the same time, so I don’t know if I had the problem or not. I don’t now….on a mid-2010 21″ iMac.