Mac OSX: I lost an .htaccess file I downloaded

Factual Questions
1

I had to tweak a .htaccess file wew use on our website. It was created in OS 9 awhile back. Just a text file saved, then renamed “.htaccess” and uploaded to the web server. No biggie, pretty run of the mill routine stuff.

Today, since I had to edit it and I’m now on teh OS X machine, I downloaded it… and it vanished. I tried to download it again and was prompted that there was that file on the desktop already.

So okay… I checked my finder preferences and it has “show all file extensions” as checked. But still nothing. I was able to get my work done by renaming the file before I downloaded it, but I really don’t like the idea of some wayward htaccess files just sitting on my hard drive and me not being able to see it.

Any ideas?

2

Yeah, sometimes the image of the desktop doesn’t get updated right after a download. (X 10.4.9). The file is there, but you can’t see it. The Find command will find it, so you can open it, or doubleclick on the Desktop icon in your ‘Home’ folder. The later usually forces an update of the actual desktop image. Your file will pop into existence.

3

That’s what worries me. I’ve tried the find function as well as refreshing my Home folders – nada. I’m positive it’s there somewhere because I was prompted about overwriting the first one. I even downloaded it a second time (overwriting the one that I can’t find) and it’s lost too. :confused:

4

In Unix, leading .dot files are hidden. The OSX Finder seems to respect this. To get a listing of everything in the directory, go to command line and say “ls -a”.

5

If you really want to see them in the Finder, enter this command at the terminal :

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

To restart the Finder so it takes effect:

killall Finder

To stop display of . files, switch the TRUE to FALSE.

6

If you don’t want to play in the Terminal, go to versiontracker.com or macupdate.com and pick up TinkerTool (free) which will (among other things) make invisible files visible and back again.

7

Are you using an FTP program like Fetch? Could you rename the file to htaccess.txt, download it, change it, reupload it and change the name back to .htaccess?

I know this would work on my Windows/CoreFTP (or most GUI FTP apps) but I am not sure what Fetch is up to these days.

8

That’s not a problem and is just what I did. (Pssst! It’s in the OP.) But I simply don’t want there to be files cluttering up my hard drive that I would like to delete now that I’m done with it.

drewbert Oh thanks, I 'll give that a try. I like the name of TinkerTool. Sounds smutty!