Period files on OSX ?

Hello everyone and greetings from North Yorkshire, U.K.

I've been a visitor for some time and have always been able to find the answers by search - rather than registering and asking. So thanks to all those who post here...

I have a question about viewing period files on a Mac, particularly .htaccess files.

I've had this OSX machine for quite a while and have only just convinced my brain to upgrade. Just realised that can’t view period files hmmmmm....

Do you know how to view these files, or is this an unchangeable feature?

Thanks for reading.

Dave

Those are called "dot-files", and represent what in Windows terminology might be considered, 'hidden' files.
If you ls -l a dir, you will not see them; if you ls -la on a dir, you will.
Typically these so-called "invisible" files are used for special configuration, be that environment variables in your home dir (.cshrc, .profile, .bashrc, .xinitrc, etc.). In the case specifically of .htaccess, it's a configuration file used for the Apache (or IHS) webserver to permit or disallow access based upon provided parameters.
In other words, if you have the file present in a web serving directory AND you have the directive authorizing the use of said files enabled in the httpd.conf, then whatever methods you employed in this configuration file will be exercised to permit or deny entry into said current directory path.

Cheers.

Thanks - I've run the command to view the files on the server. However I cant see them on OSX locally.

I was wondering if I could configure my Mac somehow to make them visible locally.

Otherwise I’ll have to ad the period after loading dot files to the server.

thanx

Dave

If you type ls -la (list -long, all) you should see dot files contained in the present directory.

Cheers.

While we're talking about hidden files in Mac OS X, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to display them in the file manager, anybody know how?