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Undercover

It's nice to see things.

It's nice to see things. Even with the ACP there are certain things that won't be visible in Apple's OS X shell. And for ordinary punters the issues multiply rapidly.

Unix has only one way of hiding a file - and it's not really a matter of hiding it anyway. It's just that the file won't often be recognised. This method is of course putting a dot ('.') in front of the file name.

But OS X has two ways of really hiding files - and they're not so easy to deal with.

  1. .hidden. A file containing names of files to be hidden.
  2. kIsInvisible. An archaic HFS flag still recognised by the OS X shell.

Perhaps the most infamous example of something on OS X being hidden against user wishes: iPod_Control on the iPod hard drive - it's kept hidden to make it more difficult for you to copy your song collection back to your hard drive.

Or someone else's.

Undercover shows you everything hidden by OS X in your system. Once it's uncovered you can do anything with it you like - and yes, even in your Finder.

Freeing Your Pod

  1. Mount your pod as always.
  2. Navigate to it in your Finder.
  3. Drop its directory on Undercover.
  4. Select iPod_Control and hit ⌘→.

Your iPod is free.

A Powerhouse

The ACP version of Undercover is integrated with FileInfo to afford you greater granularity. It also has advanced search capabilities, full drag and drop support, and nested sorting.

In fact the ACP version can function in a pinch as a file manager: you can drill down and up through the file system hierarchy in any pane in any window; you can drag items to the dock to open them; you can drag items between windows to open them; you can drag items between panes to cover and uncover them; and so forth.

It's nice to see things.

See Also
iPod Therefore iPay
Introducing Undercover
FileInfo: Control Your Pod

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