[Macpartners] Hiding Mac OS X volumes selectively...?

[Kerem B Limon]

Quoting Albert Willis <awillis at MIT.EDU>:

> 
> On May 31, 2005, at 10:47 AM, Kerem B Limon wrote:
> 
> > I've Google'd and searched the usual Mac forums, sites, etc. Before  
> > I post to
> > somewhere else, anyone know of a way to selectively hide mounted  
> > volumes under
> > Mac OS X?
> >
> > Under Mac OS Classic, you could do this using Drive Setup and  
> > checking a setting
> > that told the drive not to mount at startup and it would not show  
> > up on the
> > Desktop. I assume it flipped a bit in the mount list for that OS  
> > and/or
> > something in the partition table or boot sector of the partition. I  
> > don't see
> > something like this in Disk Utility.
> >
> > Mac OS X seems to have /etc/fstab, but as with everything else,  
> > this seems to
> > differ somewhat from typical UNIX/Linux/BSD (in fact, everything on  
> > mine are
> > commented out there and identical across machines).
> >
> > Kerem B. Limon
> > kerem.limon at mit.edu /e-mail
> 
> There's a hint over at macosxhints.com that describes what to do.  
> When you install the Developer Tools,  two utilities are added in  
> the /Developer/Tools directory: GetFileInfo and SetFile. You can use  
> SetFile to change the visibility of a volume.
> 
> More info at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? 
> story=20011018172352562
> 
>    -- Al
> 

That's nice (and exactly what I'm looking for), but the hint's from 2001 and the
GetFileInfo command doesn't work on folders (and hence volumes) on two Macs we
have here. The GetFileInfo applied to a folder or volume, say, produces:

./GetFileInfo could not be used to display info about folder

and the man page for this seems to indicate it is designed for files only.

Good thing is, SetFile seems to nonetheless let you clear the visibility bit and
that works upon launching the Finder. However, there is no way to see the
attributes.

Perhaps, I should file this as a bug report to Apple?

-Kerem


> ______________________________
> Albert Willis
> Macintosh Platform Coordinator - Software Release Team
> Information Services and Technology
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology
> awillis at mit.edu
> 
> 


Kerem B. Limon
kerem.limon at mit.edu /e-mail