On Aug 26, 2008, at 9:58 PM, Profile asked:

... I am having a hard time
finding an invisible file.   So, how do I go about seeing something I
can't see?

It's not that you can't see it; it's that the Finder is a poor tool for messing with Unix volumes. The easiest way to do these things is from the terminal, but there are utilities that let you mangle hidden files. File Buddy is the only one that pops into my head. It's been around since the Mac OS 9 days.

From the terminal, you move to the directory you want to look at and list its contents with the -a flag. For example, I have an external Firewire drive named Lothlorien:

pippin>cd /Volumes/Lothlorien
pippin>ls -a
.
..
.DS_Store
.Spotlight-V100
.TemporaryItems
.Trashes
.com.apple.timemachine.supported
.fseventsd
Desktop DB
Desktop DF
(more files removed)
pippin>

All the files with names starting with . are hidden and can't be easily munched from the Finder. (pippin> is my command prompt and not part of the commands.)

I did some poking around last evening while watching the Dems and also found there is a flag to the mdutil program that will cause an index to be reset. You could type in the terminal

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Lothlorien

to rebuild the index. Using the command 'sudo mdutil -Ea' will probably rebuild all the indices.



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