I'm looking for a way, via terminal, to change whether or not a specific file's extension is shown in the Finder, something along the lines of:
$ hideextension ~/music/somesong.mp3Without having to open Get Info and change the checkbox, as it's massively tedious.
I plan on incorporating it into a script I'm calling via a shortcut using FastScripts. I'd like to try and stay away from GUI scripting as that feels unclean, although any ideas on how to accomplish this are welcome.
16 Answers
The only real way to change this via GUI is to click Hide extension in the Finder Info window. Checking this changes the com.apple.FinderInfo extended attribute, which you normally can't edit – at least not easily. We can however use a tool to do it for us.
For the below to work, you obviously need to have Show all file extensions unchecked in Finder's preferences.
Through AppleScript
AppleScript offers this functionality with the set extension hidden command. You obviously need an alias to a file object. We can get that, for example, though a dialog. Here's just a minimal working example.
tell application "Finder" set some_file to (choose file) set extension hidden of some_file to true
end tellTo reverse, just exchange true with false here. The full call is then, for example:
set extension hidden of alias "Macintosh HD:Users:werner:Desktop:file.png" to trueYou can run this straight from a script file too (thanks @DanielBeck for the addition):
on run argv
tell application "Finder" to set extension hidden of (POSIX file (first item of argv) as alias) to true
end runSave this as filename.scpt and run it from the command line with:
osascript filename.scpt targetfileWith the SetFile command
Note: This is deprecated since Xcode 6.
If you have Xcode installed, you will get the SetFile(1) binary, which does exactly what you want (and offers a few more functions related to file attributes):
Hide extension:
SetFile -a E <file>Show extension again:
SetFile -a e <file>Thanks slhck for your Answer, it helped me a bunch to get what I wanted done.
So since I like shortcuts, I created a "Run Shell Script" Service though Automator.
for f in "$@"
do STATUS=`getFileInfo -ae "$f"` if [ $STATUS== 0 ]; then SetFile -a E "$f" else SetFile -a e "$f" fi
doneThen I went to Finder -> Services Preferences and added a shortcut to the Service.
"Command + Shift + H" didn't work for me, "Command + H" hides the application so i chose "Command + Shift + E"Hope it helps. =)
1In order to have only one argument on the command line ($ hideextension ~/music/somesong.mp3), you can make your applescript become a shell script.
It is possible to use osascript in the shebang (#!/usr/bin/osascript) like in the following code.
To proceed :
- Test your applescript code in a .scpt file => toggle_hidden_extension.scpt
- When OK, add the shebang (
#!/usr/bin/osascript) at the beginning of the file - Export it with file format "text" => toggle_hidden_extension.applescript
- Change extension to .sh => toggle_hidden_extension.sh
In Terminal, make it executable :
chmod u+x toggle_hidden_extension.shNow you can run it :
./toggle_hidden_extension.sh /path/to/myfile.mp3
So, the code to illustrate:
#!/usr/bin/osascript
(*
usage: toggle_hidden_extension.sh file
*)
(*
Test 1 : ./toggle_hidden_extension.sh /Users/boissonnfive/Desktop/file.txt
Test 2 : ./toggle_hidden_extension.sh
Test 3 : ./toggle_hidden_extension.sh 0fdjksl/,3
*)
on run argv try processArgs(argv) toggleHiddenExtension(item 1 of argv) on error return usage() end try if result then return "Extension hidden for " & POSIX path of (item 1 of argv) else return "Extension revealed for " & (POSIX path of (item 1 of argv)) end if
end run
on usage() return "usage: toggle_hidden_extension.sh file"
end usage
on processArgs(myArgs) set item 1 of myArgs to POSIX file (first item of myArgs) as alias
end processArgs
on toggleHiddenExtension(myFile) tell application "Finder" to set extension hidden of myFile to not (extension hidden of myFile)
end toggleHiddenExtensionThere is one more option if you want to show file extension that is currently hidden: Finder stores this "hide extension" option in com.apple.FinderInfo extended file attribute. You can check it yourself by running this command which lists all extended attributes:
xattr -l /path/to/the/fileSo, in order to show the extension, you can remove that attribute:
xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /path/to/the/fileBut keep in mind that Finder stores other metadata such as tag color in this attribute, so this metadata will be lost. And, since the attribute is binary, you cannot easily modify it.
Even if SetFile is deprecated since Xcode 6 it’s still available in XCode 11, so you can expect it to remain in the Command Line Tools for the foreseable future...
$ pkgutil --payload-files /Volumes/Command\ Line\ Developer\ Tools/Command\ Line\ Tools.pkg | grep SetFile
./Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/SetFile
./Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/share/man/man1/SetFile.1Here is an AppleScript that will work on a finder selection and allow you to unhide the file extensions on all selected files.
tell application "Finder" if not (get selection) = {} then set theSelection to (selection as alias list) else display alert "Nothing selected in the Finder." giving up after 10 return end if
end tell
repeat with theFile in theSelection tell application "Finder" to set extension hidden of theFile to false
end repeat
